


It's Always Sunny In Andromeda

by Valkurion



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Also Cora is Asari-sexual, Blood, Combat, Comedy, Conspiracy, Cora gets a girlfriend, Explosions, F/F, Family, Fluff, Gay Cora, Girl On Girl, Heavy Violence, Lesbian Sex, Lesbians, Mild Gore, Mild comedy, Mostly Fluff, Multi, Nudity, Self-Harm, Sex, Smut, Some References, Some angst, Strong Language, Tags to be updated throughout, Violence, Yuri, asari sex, female main character, melding, plot heavy, queer, wlw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-14 23:38:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10546302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valkurion/pseuds/Valkurion
Summary: Now, the year is 2819, over six hundred years into the future, the colonists have finally arrived in Andromeda and have been met with trial after trial and hardship at every corner imaginable. The central hub of colonisation efforts has suffered over a year of mutiny and open Rebellion, setting a Salarian named Tann as Director of the Initiative. The Turian ark was nearly destroyed before arriving at the rendezvous. The Salarian ark was nearly captured by a hostile alien race known as the Kett. The human Pathfinder, Alec Ryder was killed in action upon the arrival of the Human ark.But amidst the toil, Alec’s daughter, Sarah Ryder, became the new Pathfinder and found the Vaults and Meridian, technology from a mysterious and lost race known as the Remnant. Thanks to Ryder, Humanity now has a home in Andromeda, and the leader of the Heleus band of Kett, the Archon has been killed. But the task of colonising Andromeda is not yet over.With her team ready and brother Scott Ryder aboard to train as a Pathfinder too, Sarah now journey’s across Heleus, to find more homes and planets ripe for colonisation, all in the name of the Andromeda Initiative and their dead founder, Jien Garson.





	1. It's Always Sunny On The Tempest

Tempest jumped out of FTL, and Sarah Ryder was still standing at her dashboard overlooking the vast black ocean that was the Heleus Cluster and Andromeda itself. Sara let loose a sigh of awe, from seeing the black heaven in front of her. 

The surface of Daeus was desolate and catastrophic even with the terraforming of Meridian taking effect - or supposed to be taking effect - and scrubbing it of impurities inflicted by the Scourge. So much so that it made the intrepid scientist, combat sentinel and Human Pathfinder, Sara Ellen Ryder, rub her forehead in dismay. As she looked at it, all the ups and downs of the months prior since arriving rather worryingly in the Andromeda Galaxy came flooding to the forefront of her cognitive thought. All the sassy one-liners she’d fed her new team, all the missions to hospitable planets with creatures there out for her hide. Even activating Meridian, and planting the seeds of terraforming throughout the Heleus Cluster. 

And there was still one ‘golden world’ that would, of course, refuse to fall in line. 

Two weeks in fact, after Sara and her family had activated Meridian and introduced the vapid Archon with his fate and she hadn’t stopped. Outposts were being established on new worlds before proper colonisation efforts could be lifted from Nexus Control. It was all running seemingly like some form of broken or lagging clockwork. Tann and Addison had more paperwork on their desks as Sara thought imaginable and even Scott was up and about, getting his feet wet and his brain working in Pathfinder training. The Nexus itself was entering the final stages of its construction and the Angara were busy rebuilding their Empire and reclaiming the worlds lost to them with the Kett occupation. The bony bastards of Andromeda still remained but without their Archon, they were useless and disorganised. 

Sara barely had enough time to take new girlfriend Pelessaria B’Sayle on a right and proper first date, or in fact requisition a new escape pod to be her new bedroom. For the least two weeks, the spunky spelunker of an Asari had been huddled in a small corner of Ryder’s quarters. 

“Kallo, we’re sure this planet is safe to even land on?” Sara asked having seen the energy readings of the colossal storm that was spreading over the north of the planet. Her Pathfinder console in front of her was alight with readings. The oddest thing was that the Scourge was nowhere they could see or detect. It was not present in this system, and yet Daeus was riddled with electric storms and a hostile atmosphere of mostly trace elements of nitrogen and ammonia. It was as deadly as it came to ecosystems. 

Daeus itself looked like a garden world, incubating uninhabitable and deadly gases for an atmosphere and no doubt swarming with other hazards. It looked spoiled. To Sara’s well-travelled eyes it looked like the kind of world that, if habitable, would belong to the Batarians back in the Milky Way. The type of world that the Alliance of Human Systems would leave them. It even reminded her of Habitat-7, or what it looked like before the Initiative had seeded it with their rudimentary terraforming devices once Ryder had made all first outposts on hundred percent viable. 

The memory of Alec came to her, of his last act to save her and make her Pathfinder. 

Kallo Jath looked at his data feed and the rest of his instruments, all the readings and checks were balanced and their position was correct. There had been no mock up with the FTL or their position and the scan showed one viable place to land. “Well there’s one small place near a Remnant structure, but there is a heavy electrical presence and what seems like another ship in low orbit,” Kallo reported in his nasally and intelligent sounding voice. The typical voice of a Salarian that almost always made Sara smile because no human could measure to it precisely. 

“Initial scans indicate that the ship is Kett but there are a few smaller sigs down there in the storm. I’m reading some traces of Initiative signals, Ryder,” Suvi Anwar began, checking her own readouts and instruments. Secondly, she deferred to the stark image of the planet in front of her. 

Sara sipped on her coffee, before replacing it on the console as she had become accustomed to. “Look,” she pointed to the coming storms. “There’s a massive hurricane thunderstorm coming across the northern hemisphere. Reminds me of Habitat-7.”

“You mean Ryder-1 right?” Kallo corrected her, notifying her of her equally massive success in making Heleus viable for the Initiative. But Ryder rather hated being reminded that she had a planet named after her. It was embarrassing as an archaeologist. 

Sara cocked her head with a peculiar smile and eyed Kallow widely, she was grinning like a schoolgirl finding a credit chit on the street and buying some candy. “Ohhh, I betcha read a lotta Gordon Wood, huh? You read your Gordon Wood and you regurgitate it from a textbook and you think you’re wicked awesome doin’ that, and how ‘bout ‘dem apples? And all that Gordon Wood business,” she spouted at him like a Charger submachine gun a faux human Irish accent that was totally lost on Kallo, as too were the words. He just looked at her vapidly, void of all understanding as if she had dribbled all down her Initiative white shirt. Sara stood looking at him with arms raised as if something was massively amiss. She scoffed turned back to looking at Daeus once Kallo just looked away. 

“You people have no sense of time. Why do I even bother trying to reference twenty-first-century sitcoms anymore?” She finally asked rhetorically. 

She soon relaxed and pinned the comm on her omni-tool, selecting the channel to the med bay, where brother Scott should have been; little brother Scott, as he was in her mind and had been for every second of his life. Sara was born one minute ahead of him and she would not let it go until the day she died. Even if he did first. 

The minute younger brother was sat on one of the examination beds below deck with Dr Lexi T’Perro prodding and poking in his ear, scanning the back of his neck. It was where the SAM implant lay in every Pathfinder and their hopefuls. Cora Harper had one too. Scott felt the buzzing running down his forearm and answered the comm while Lexi pulled a face. 

Scott was smiling as he answered, “Pathfinder. What’s up?” Came from him through his grin, he knew his twin sister hated being referred to as the Pathfinder by him. No one else, only Scott could urk her when he called her by title and not by first name or ‘sis.’

“Please don’t call me that the whole time you’re here, little brother.” Sara jabbed back. As much as she disliked him calling her anything but her first, last name or sister, she knew that he had and always would hate being called the little one. It was in his male genes, something he always judged himself for, being the second and last one out of the womb. She was chastising him from the bridge, and even Lexi smiled next to Scott when his sister called him out, she had no doubt had similar experiences with her family or friends.The banter and tomfoolery between Ryder and Ryder had been reducing most of the crew to stitches of laughter for the better half of the past week. Except for Kallo and Jaal a lot. They could hardly understand the insults and most certainly the references to various movies and sitcoms were lost of them. Lexi struggled, as did Vetra a couple of times but they got a lot more than the Salarian and the Angaran. Needless to say, Scott had been matching Sara’s with and sarcasm note for note. However they still remained their own persons and the family could see that every day, with Sara the more caring, compassionate and still mostly driven by her positive emotions and need to care. She was still the more polite and quirky. While Scott Ryder was more calculating and more logistically driven by binary thinking. He was still the stereotypical soldier, dominated by basic training and the conditioning of the hardcore and the best in military personnel. It screamed tonnes of their individual characters and why they had been selected past their father Alec to be in the Pathfinder Team. 

Scott would be gone before long anyway, being groomed by Kandros to become APEX Mission Coordinator for the Human APEX squads out of the Nexus. With more outposts and the population looking to increase, Kandros needed his militia to expand, and Scott was looking fairly competent to take command of the human element. All he was aboard Tempest for, was Pathfinder training from Sara and Cora, her second. Technically, Scott was third in line, but he looked disinterested in discovering the frontier after losing his father. 

The whole point of the title was that it not be hereditary or a form of despotic royalty for those in the line of work. And yet, thanks to Alec Ryder, the whole chain of succession was askew. 

“Sure thing,” Scott settled, quickly before backtracking with, “Pathfinder,” he teased, still smiling to Doctor T’Perro. She had finished smiling back and was looking for more tools to poke and prod at him with. It was all to make sure his SAM implant was working fine, but she was getting some dead noise from it. “I’m almost one with Lexi, I’ll be kitted out and ready for shakedown in less than thirty.”

Lexi gripped his left arm rather harshly and bent his neck. “I don’t think so Scott, I’m getting nothing from your SAM implant and there’s no way you’ll be heading into combat without him, you’d be better off flying through a hurricane with stick,” Lexi corrected him, scanning through his neck with a small device. He squirmed a little, used to a gentle treatment of the Hyperion’s Cryo Bay and then the Medbay after his little run in with the Archon. This was annoying and getting to be a drag. But Lexi T’Perro was persistent. 

Sara sided with Lexi. “Slow down little brother, I don’t want you on this one, too many unknowns and you’re still thawing.”

“I’ve been thawing for over two months now, I need some action, to get my feet wet sis,” Scott begged, but Sara had already made up her mind as soon as she saw the state of Daeus. It reminded her too much of Habitat-7 and she had already lost one Ryder to conditions like those. Scott was not going down there to die, not ever. 

“I’ll take Peebee, Vetra and Cora with me, Scott. Stay with Liam and Drack, I’m sure those two can put you through your paces in the garage,” Ryder smiled, thinking of how many Scott-shaped dents in the bulkheads the ex-copper and walking krogan tank could make before the away team came back. Regardless what her brother thought Sara was Pathfinder, she was the officer in command and Tempest was her ship. Right now Scott was little more than a glorified cadet.

He was disappointed nonetheless, he’d been aboard the vessel just over a week and not much had happened for him besides from all the visits and stays with Lexi down below deck and across the hall from the bunks. There was some swapping of stories from the chasing of the Archon and the establishing of the outposts all over Heleus. Vetra had recalled the standoff between Sloane Kelley and Reyes Vidal, praising how Ryder held both their lives in her hands. Sara could have by all rights shot them both down and taken over Kadara Port for the Initiative. She could have slammed Foster Addison in charge. But Sara Ryder was cooler than that. 

She had sex with Reyes the night before and then shot him in his shoulder before he could escape from Sloane gunning him down. “Serves him right for cheating,” Sara’s excuse had been. 

As Scott had told all of his immense responsibility of safeguarding a Mass Relay, Drack and Lieutenant Harper outmatched him every single time. Cora’s tales of being an Asari Commando were enthralling and Drack’s stories of his huge life span were amazing. 

“Habitat-7 was the roughest world we saw Scott, and Daeus already looks too much like it did for me to be comfortable with you down there. And then there’s your implant. Without SAM you’re a normal soldier, and I need more than normal this time buddy. Stay home,” Sara told him one final time as she looked down at the planet again. It looked bad and sent a shiver down her spine. 

Scott looked down but then smiled and called to her, silencing the comm and just shouting from the med bay. “Then start breakin’ bricks, wet nips!”

Sara laughed, chuckling to herself a moment. “The worst that happens if you go is you die and I have to spend weeks on end with paperwork and telling Mom you didn’t listen to me again in your life, along with people endlessly giving me the whole ‘Oh I’m so sorry for your loss Pathfinder’, or ‘First Alec and now Scott, it’s horrible.’” She giggled, loving his mild snigger at her jokes. “Best is you just fall flat off the ramp and fall in the mud.”

“And here I thought with my sister being the Prothean expert, playing in the mud would be your go to Sara,” Scott bit back, smiling down in Medbay, but he knew where he was lost. He wasn’t going and thus lay back on the bed and readied himself for a day of Lexi trying to get his implant working once again. His exchange with the Archon must have frazzled it and it must have taken up until now to realise that it was broken. Dumb luck he supposed. Sara’s decision had landed with him however, he was grounded. “Okay sis, I get it, Scott stays home today, but you owe me one.”

“I’ll get you a beer next time we hit Vortex.”

“More than that Sara.”

Sara Ryder scoffed a little and silenced her comm, turning around just to see and hear her beloved Pelessaria B’Sayle come out of her small compact hidey-hole that was the escape pod bay with no escape pod. She was already looking to her own omni-tool, on call with what looked like Gil from the drive core. The rhythmic pitter-patter footsteps of the quirky self-proclaimed expert of Rem-tech were always distinct. They were a sweet melody to the academic Sara and over the months together, cooped up on Tempest, she had sussed out the way Peebee walked and moved. It was all with the same sway that the Asari had when she stood before Ryder. 

The Pathfinder left her dashboard and stopped with her back to Suvi but with Kallo still in her peripheral vision while she focused on Peebee’s luscious tones of blue in the tentacles, and the beautiful curve of her bitable jawline. 

“Gil, for the last time,” Peebee was finishing, “I don’t want my reproductive blocker removed, subverted or suppressed by your baby-crazed friend.” Sara’s facial muscles tensed and then relaxed as she pulled a face at the mention of kids. “I. Don’t. Want. Kids. Gil.” Peebee emphasised. Ryder’s gut relaxed a little at that, a certain relief seen as Sara was taking the same stance on childbearing at the moment. Her throat, however, grew dry. Pelessaria soon saw her girlfriend and kissed her cheek, barely noticing the pale complexion of her face. “Oh don’t worry honey, I’m just trying to keep Gil to keep Jill was it?” She pulled an incredulous face, “as far away from me as physically possible, even further than Lexi.” She rectified. 

Sara gave a shaking and awkward laugh, finally breathing again once it was all cleared up. “I like my reproduction blocker right where I have it right now and my babies, you know, not conceived,” Peebee continued with her usual amount of sass in her beautiful voice. The very voice that always seemed to make Ryder reconsider the prospect of conception. 

“Aww, honey, no Ryder-bee B’Sayle blue babies running around the Nexus anytime soon? Addison’s gonna be so upset, she told me she wanted to be a godmother so much!” Sara joked with her thick smile on show. It made Peebee smile too, but she was internally unimpressed it seemed. Peebee gave her girlfriend a low and rather pompous chuckle at that, arrogant and with a hint of villainy as her laughs always were. She was very up herself and yet not. Part of her attractiveness to Sara’s eyes. 

Peebee kissed Sara closely and passionately, downright snogging her before the two bridge staff. Suvi even caught a small glimpse before Kallo silently told her to stop. 

There suddenly came a slight grain of background noise over the loudspeakers in the bridge; the usual clarity that washed over the faint hum of the drive core in operation that was SAM addressing a room. “Pathfinder, I am being directed a vid call from a ship located on the far side of Daeus, the ship is registering as an Initiative vessel.”

Sara instantly looked to Suvi Anwar. “I’m getting nothing boss, no ships on the other side of the planet.”

“It could be stealth, but I know of no other ship from the Nexus that has stealth technology apart from the Tempest,” Kallo interjected in a fast series of words, scrubbing the small amount of interference around Daeus to try and find it. His search found nothing except the Kett presence ground side. 

A shape jolt of worry zapped its way down Sara’s spine, her sixth sense that had been developing during her time as Pathfinder. It usually told her something was wrong or was about to go very much so. This planet was nothing, a blip on their radar. Kett was to be expected, but not stealthed Initiative ships. Either something was off or it was heavily about to be as Sara kissed Peebee quickly and headed towards the comm suite. 

The hologram awaiting her was that of Sloane Kelley, the battle-hardened and bitchy ruler of Kadara Port, the very woman who was only still in command because Sara had allowed it. “Pathfinder, mind telling me what brings you to this hellish ball of storms?” Sloane asked Sara, her grunting old accent of cockney London breathing sickly into Sara’s ears. She despised Sloane’s voice, it was ghastly and just wrong-sounding to her. 

“Sloane, great to see you again,” she quickly greeted before dropping all pleasantries. “Mind telling me why you have a ship that can go stealth on my ass?”

The barbarian smiled with piercing eyes as she swapped leaning legs and folded her arms. “Call it insurance, and while you’re not answering my first question think of this. How’d you like to make some credits? Or maybe som supplies for your shitty little outpost in the badlands? I hear they need some guns these days,” Sloane’s devil lips slithered. She really was snake-like, ugly in tongue and brutish. Sara was suddenly rethinking saving her from the cowardly Reyes Vidal, otherwise known as the Charlatan. Sara thought about this horrid conversation could be going with his beautiful voice and face on the other end over Sloane’s. She’d certainly prefer Reyes than this witch. 

Sara herself leant on the other leg and her brow furrowed, it was hard work dealing with Sloane in reality. It was easy to see why so many people judged the Exiles, seen as Sloane was the head-steaking and looting face of their people. 

But Sara knew nothing of Sloane’s involvement in the Initiative before they left the Milky Way or her involvement in the Nexus Uprising.

It was unfair and unwise to judge Sloane on her beastly actions in the past sixteen months. 

“I don’t work for bloody credits like some of your people. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll think about it, Sloane. Oh and to answer your first question, I’m on orders from Addison to scout this world for colonisation,” Sara responded fairly systematically and by the book. Like her brother would respond to an order. She instantly felt weaker than Kelley, but often did when standing in the same room as the woman, she was toned and could probably lift twice the weight as Sara. 

Sloane jotted some coordinates into her omni-tool, sending them across space to Sara’s with a smile on her face. “Here are the coordinates of a Kett base I need blowing up, you should find our goals coincide, and there’s a pretty package inside that you might want to look at before my men do. Be warned I’ll be telling them to shoot you down on sight so I’d hurry if were you.”

Ryder was about to speak again with an irked expression but Sloane cut her off. “If you get the package just set a beacon down and I’ll come see you myself, no guns, and if you die well, that means I get it for myself.”

“What the hell are you playing at?” Sara asked, receiving the coordinates. 

“I don’t know you yet Ryder, sure we fought and bled together but right now you’re still Tann’s puppet,” Sloane spat at her, her smile fading rather quickly to a violent frown as she grunted her distaste for the Salarian. Sara could tell there was an unspoken history there.

“First thing you should have learned on the Nexus, Ryder… Don’t fucking trust Tann.”


	2. It's Always Sunny On Daeus, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Foster Addison wakes up to yet another day on the Nexus, dealing with all the growing pains that have developed with the landing on Meridian. During her morning, Addison is contacted by two people she does not expect - Sloane Kelley and The Charlatan. Meanwhile, Sara and the team are caught up in a sneak attack by the Kett as they try to land on Daeus and they end up separated before assaulting the Kett base.

Addison woke, a new day made up of artificial light, heat from generators powered by solar panels dotted all over the Nexus and the two remaining arks hoisted to her. It was a little warmer than usual as she beat her alarm, turning it off before it rattled her. How Foster wanted to catch a few more minutes resting, but the colonies were expanding from the outposts, and her job was getting busier and busier. 

She got up, hazy and a little dizzily from the change in, up until now, constant humidity. She was naked, often how she slept, letting her body breathe under the thin layered sheets, only this morning she felt the muggy sweat race down her bare chest and drip onto her toes. A stretch was first, hoisting her arms high above her head and really breaking out all the dry cracks in her bones. She spread her legs, looking out of the window into the dead of space. Foster Addison was one of those lucky enough to have secured a room with a view of the strange and alien nebula of Andromeda. In a fluid motion, a series of stretches and pulls on her ageing joints Addison fell into a routine of yoga of sorts, to wake her body up before she would shower. Most people would shower first, or at least clothe themselves, but Foster knew that no one could see her like this, and the slight breeze of movement on her nude flesh was a pleasant sensation that made the back of her neck tingle. She enjoyed it, the few calm moments of water-like peace before the frantic operations of the day would commence. No doubt Jarun Tann and her assistant Breker were already in dire need of her direction. 

Tann, Addison thought, what a spineless Salarian and coward, a man shadier and shrouded in black than even the Shadow Broker himself back in the Milky Way. 

The sudden thought of the flat-footed amphibian made her neck muscles tense and she almost yelped from the sudden cramp. She stopped all stretching and stood straight, backing up to sit back on the bed. Her thumbs rolled over the trouble spot, massaging it as she sat naked, the windows wide open still with the rays of this new star lighting her up like some form of an angel. It had been such a long time in Andromeda already. And Foster had seen it all, all sixteen months of it now, more than anyone else had seen in the new Galaxy, more so than Ryder. 

Addison had been one of the first people brought out of cryo, right before the Nexus hit what was recognised by the Initiative as ‘Andromedan Space.’ She was standing at the head of the Nexus with the crew of pilots when they hit the Scourge, and the whole process became that much harder. 

When they lost Jien Garson. 

“Addison,” Tann’s voice came over the tannoy to her apartment, and while the cramp in the back of Foster’s neck had soothed, her patience for him already broke. She hated him, plain and simple, hated Tann with what little capacity she even had for it. All of it went to what Kesh called ‘Number Eight’, that being Tann. And him being worthy of the nickname was because of his position in the line of succession for Director of The Initiative, number eight. Foster instantly began to wonder what her life would be like if it were Jien’s beautiful voice coming through the tannoy, slow and compassionate understanding of the strain on resources and Foster’s will to go on. Instead, it was the irritating slither of Jarun Tann. 

All in all, Foster could say she missed Jien the most, out of everyone who had died in the sixteen months adrift in Andromeda. No one else even came close. 

She slammed her hand on the answering machine on the bedside table, thrusting an arm over her chest. The thought of even Tann’s voice being in the room with her naked was a disgusting one to her, and not just because any man could disgust her. Jarun was especially abysmal to her mind. Her eyes shut tightly instinctively and she bit her lip.

“What is it, Tann?” Addison spat at his omnipresent voice, she wanted just a few more moments alone, with her thoughts, her body, hell with her mind away from his stupid self. She had aimed to shower before he caught her. “What do you need?”

“I need those resource reports from Prodromos, as well as the Salarian Colony on Ayirathil. You said you’d have them on my desk this morning Foster,” Jarun Tann reminded her in his fish-like, dry and throaty tones. They were enough to make Addison want to vomit already. 

She pressed again on the answer button. “Yes I have them, let me shower god damn it Jarun and I’ll be up.” She barked back, biting her lip again and silencing the machine so he couldn’t retort. She hated his voice, and sixteen months of it non-stop had been just about enough to drive her insane. Then she looked out to the stars, the alien suns that had been a dream over six hundred years ago to her and every other man, woman, child and other in the Initiative. It did not feel like six hundred years to Foster Addison, in fact, she was convincing herself that she was the only person from the Milky Way who thought it now seemed longer away, further back in time. 

It felt like a millennium away. Especially without Jien Garson there to lead them. 

Feeling vulnerable, Foster walked to the window and pressed her forehead against the glass, wishing for just a second that she could take up a small position on Eos or retire permanently to Elaaden to help some of the outposts or colonies. Perhaps, New London, she thought. She’d like that. But then again. She’d like to go back to sleep, in cryostasis, and wake up with Jien back in charge. 

Addison didn’t trust Tann, just as Sloane had never. 

“Don’t trust Tann?” Cora Harper reiterated once she, Vetra Nyx, Pelessaria B’Sayle and Sara were all preparing weapons and strapping armour down to their limbs and chests. Cora’s felt a little tighter than usual and when she squirmed to fit her breastplate down, Peebee laughed a little. “Is that all Sloane said, Ryder?” Cora continued, straddling her own chest making it comfortable under the plate. She let out a soft grunt, and Peebee sniggered again. 

Sara pulled a face, a jaunt with her lips and then hummed herself. “Actually it was more like,” she began, coughing and then grunting into an impersonation of Sloane’s accent. “‘Don’t fucking trust that fucking Tann,” she mimicked comically with a growl following and hunching her shoulders up above her own neck. It was quite the spectacle. A better performance than her ensemble with Kallo Jath during the Movie Night. “I’m the leader of the Exiles, look at me I’ve got a rough old London accent! Grr!” Sara continued until the alarm bell of the critical emergency precaution sounded off. All of the women stopped their banter and their bodies tensed. 

Head shifted and hands reached for weapons, Sara grabbing her Talon Sub-Machine Gun fully loaded and her utility belt stocked with spare thermal clips. Peebee’s hand tensed for the Sidewinder pistol on her hip and Cora’s forehead showed sweat through the emergency lighting that had enveloped the garage. Shit had looked to be well and truly hitting the fan and Sara needed a status report. 

“Kallo? Suvi? The hell’s with all the chop?” She asked into her omni-tool, feeling some strain on the inertial dampeners. The ship was rattling more than an anxiety attack, which Sara was low-key about to start having once the shudders became more intense. 

Peebee bolted for her girlfriend and clasped a hand around hers. Cora and Vetra held onto the loadout bench as equipment jumped and hurled everywhere. The Nomad was strapped down but Vetra looked uneasy as she saw it tremble. 

It took several seconds for Sara to hear a response, in which time her hands really began to shake with fear. “Kallo!” She repeated with a more fearful and rushed shout. Peebee wrapped a strong and willful arm around her for comfort. It did a little in ways of settling the still shellshocked Sara but she was still internally reeling from the intensity of the firefight for Meridian. The shaking and inability to do anything to stop it was making her want to hurl and made her bones feel like they were going to loosen. 

“Ryder!” Peebee shouted over the whooshing and the rattling of the Tempest’s bones. “It’s okay doll! Hold onto me and relax! It’s okay!” She yelled over the noises. It was getting even louder but Kallo did not respond. It took SAM using the ship to come back to Sara with a report, by which time she was internally screaming for quiet. 

His static and robotic voice was actually calming over the faux war zone that was the Tempest garage. “Pathfinder, I have read the situation and reported with Kallo. Shipwide comms are down and we are under attack from Kett Fighters. He is attempting to lose them in the electrical storms but they are proving difficult to evade,” SAM told her, bringing her heart rate down with the sound of his soothing voice washing over her mind via their private channel. He was speaking both inside her head and outside to the team because of the sound. 

That and SAM knew in just the manner he needed to talk to calm Sara down. He could feel her distress and pain. 

“How the hell do we talk to the bridge then?” Cora asked, just as Drack fell from the balcony over the garage and landed on his back, laughing at the toss and tumble of the room. Cora missed the point, however, the one that Sara had instantly observed. There was no way to get to or to talk to the bridge, they were cut off with the intense spinning and moving of the Tempest through such a rough environment. It was Habitat-7 all over again, how they had been blasted out of their shuttles by the storms. Liam had been with her then, her father in another shuttle. Now she had her girlfriend, Vetra and Cora, with Drack it seemed as he stumbled over to a weapon locker and ripped the door off of it. 

He pulled out his brick of a shotgun and jaunted over to the huddling squad of four over by the large drop ramp. “Buckle up buttercups! Only one way to make it planetside now!” The ancient krogan roared at the top of his mighty lungs, like a proud lion, only more deadly and destructive. For a moment, even smiling, Sara thought he was about to charge right through the bulkhead. 

“Drack’s right!” Sara shouted, pulling her helmet to her with her slim slither of biotics and slamming it down over her head. She hoped to high heaven that the glass wouldn’t shatter this time. She really did not like electrical storms and shitty planets. Peebee clasped on her protective mouthpiece and Cora and Vetra slammed on their helmets too, all were ready amidst the shaking and rattling of the metal cage they found themselves in. “We don’t know if the Tempest can even land! So we have to jump, find the biggest Kett base we can! Hopefully, it’ll contain whatever the hell Sloane’s after and then we work out how to get the storms in check! Don’t worry about contact with Tempest for now! Just focus on landing!” Sara shouted to her valkyries, inspiring them and making sure they weren’t rattled. Vetra wasn’t the biggest fan of free falls although she loved rock climbing. 

“We’ll find each other and then assault a base!” She told them, ironing out her resolve and their orders. Sara hated playing commander, that was not her style at all, this was a civilian woman in a military role, and she had never been accustomed to it. Ryder was a scientist, and while she could beat a man to death with ease, she was never a soldier, that was Scott’s role. 

SAM came into her ear again as soon as the landing ramp was down a small bit, enough for all of the squad to fire themselves out of the garage with a quick burst of their jump jets. They would have to jump in very rapid succession. “Pathfinder, I advise the squad jump as soon as possible, I detect a very large Kett structure ahead about forty kilometres and closing in.”

Nakmor Drack did not need telling, the hulking krogan charged forward at top speeds and practically blasted himself off of the tip of the ramp, plummeting to the floor of the planet. Vetra was next, right after him and on Sara’s wave, then Cora with what she could do. The biotic had to create a small mass effect field ahead of her so she wasn’t peppered back by the gale force winds. 

Then it was down to Peebee and Sara, who, holding hands and creating their own fields, ran and blasted each other forward and off of the Tempest. Leaving SAM to close the ramp save destroying it. It was all down to Kallo to keep the weaponless vessel intact now. As Sara fell she looked back up, seeing the thing roar and zoom back into space, to the clarity and protection of the sea of stars. Kallo must have detected the ramp opening and realised what Ryder and company were doing. Sara saw Cora and Vetra just ahead of her and Pelessaria, but she could not bring herself to let go of the Asari's hand. She held it tighter than anything before in her life and could barely hear the shouting coming from her girlfriend. 

“Ryder!” Peebee was yelling through the fuzzy and noisy communication devices in their helmets. “Sara! Don’t let go of me okay?!” 

“Peebee! I’m not letting go! Stay with me Peebee!”

The rest of the trip down to the planet’s surface was a blur, but Sara and Peebee managed to get their jump jets to fire and then the small flight guidance systems to work, allowing them to glide down, but the wind took them up again. Before they both knew it, Sara and Peebee had hit the ground rather hard, not hard enough to destroy helmets, or not at the right angles, but nonetheless, all faded to black. They were both knocked out from the fall.

They had landed on a wild and chaotic Daeus.

“Breker have you even had breakfast yet?” Foster Addison asked as she walked up the ramp to the overviewing panel that was the Colonial Affairs office. Still makeshift as it was, but Addison had developed and forced clockwork over the past months, and moving now would only slow the response to the rapidly growing array of colonies. Prodromos was growing at an extensive rate, as well as the outpost on Elaaden, New Tuchanka as it was still called. She did not know what to think about that. Addison supposed that it was still unwise to create civil arguments with Morda and the Krogan, based on past experience. 

Only, that made her think of Spender, the coward, either dead on Kadara in an unmarked grave or rotting in some slaver’s cell in another system in the cluster. Still, Breker brought her back, placing her a small cup of tea on a saucer on the table, his decanter behind him at his station. Their office overlooked the hangar bay designated for resource transport and commerce while the one on the polar end of the station was for directory travel and transport of colonists. 

After all, that was what they all were now. Colonists of the Milky Way in Andromeda. Addison prayed it would never turn out like most human colonisation efforts in her species’ history. 

“I have breakfast sometimes, but not recently, too busy with you Director Addison,” Breker informed her in his polite east European accent. He was Lithuanian or Romanian, something Addison faintly remembered reading about him but had never asked to check, and now she had forgotten they had been through so much. But Breker looked like he needed a break, and she could see the strain in his young eyes. No doubt the traces of all-nighter on either energy suspension drinks or just a boatload of his beautiful tea. 

Foster took the tiny cup and drank hers slowly, not all in one go, as many did with their coffee. She was on the fence over the warm beverage debate. Addison enjoyed tea and coffee one and the same, not one over the other. 

She placed her hand over his and looked him in his tried and soft eyes; he had been working non-stop for her since the Hyperion had made planetfall on Meridian. “Breker, go to the diner on level six and get yourself a danish, hell a croissant if you really feel like it. And a cup of better tea that this ration garbage they’ve left you with.” Addison ordered him in a gentle voice over the faint murmur of wandering colonial officers. “Then for the love of god get your head down on my sofa for three or four hours, I’ll pull Susanna and Garrett from their spa session and work through all these requisitions.” 

“Are you sure Director?” Breker asked her, so polite as he always was. She nodded to him and smiled again, taking her hand back and holding her tea, she was adamant but silent and soothing, friendly, or as much as she could manage with her waning span of human emotion. She could constantly feel Tann’s fish-like eyes praying over her whittled shoulders. 

What was Tann’s problem? It seemed he was constantly looking for something to beat her down for, some small fraction of failure. Addison was still basically running the primary directive of the Initiative by herself. Kandros was militia, which was dumbfoundedly barely needed now the Exiles were slowly returning and an alliance had been drawn with the Krogan Colony. Kesh was Superintendent, more useful to the colony than the Nexus, and Tann was far more interested in blowing steam up his own collar, taking credit for all Ryder was doing. 

It was ridiculous, and standard politics, which Addison thought she had escaped by coming to Andromeda.

“Director Addison? You have a priority one message on your private terminal, I believe it’s from Sloane Kelley,” one the assistants alerted Addison too, causing her to take her attention from Breker. She sighed and rolled her eyes. The one person in this new galaxy that was more insufferable than Jarun Tann was Sloane Kelley, especially since she had adopted her new barbaric cliche look and lifestyle. 

She gave Breker a sly look, almost flirty, but Foster had never flirted with anyone in her life, she doubted if she ever had the capacity to flirt with anyone. Then she waved her hands behind her in a dramatic flourish and flair. “It’s always sunny in Andromeda, Breker, now get your head down for a few.” It sounded like an order, no matter how she dressed it up. But he smiled and chuckled to himself as he grabbed his decanter and walked away from the Colonial Affairs office and down into the Operations Hub.

Addison saw a rather bulky transport turn and come in for docking, it made her both proud of her job and position and also aloof about what it might be carrying. It was all so logistical around here and she was only just now slotting in so perfectly. Still, it drove her back and shoulders inward and down with all the stress and responsibility. One wrong number here or a false location there and suddenly an outpost would fail and everyone living there would die almost certainly. Meridian had and could only do so much in terms of prolonged viability and sustainability for Heleus, Nexus was still the main centre for resources and relief, and without Hyperion, it felt a little thinner around the day to day. 

All in all, Foster liked her status, she liked the responsibility and the goal at the end, and the challenge too, it was a tumultuous one at that. 

She checked her mail, finding the correspondence from Sloane Kelley, followed by one from a mysterious sender, their information blocked, and thus she checked that one first. 

“Addison, Foster - Sloane Kelley is going insane, she’s rallying the Exiles out of Kadara Port and building up stockpiles away from the Kadara Initiative Outpost, hell it looks like she’s gunning for a war here, or another Rebellion. I stole this address from Ryder one night, I was not sure if I would need it or not, guess it pays to be careful. You should be careful too, Addison. - The Charlatan.”

Who was the Charlatan? Addison pondered, before reading Sloane’s message, wary of what that might contain. 

“Foster. Sloane. I’ve found something. Or rather, I’ve got Ryder to find something. Just know when I get my hands on it, everyone is going to know what you did. You and Tann. There will be no place you’ll be able to hide. From anyone. 

“Don’t fucking trust Tann. - Sloane.”

Addison covered her mouth, got up from her chair, without saying a single word to anyone, without even finishing the tea that Breker had left her. Instead, she kept her mouth covered, as tears began to pour from her eyes, and she sprinted right to Kesh’s office to her right.


	3. It's Always Sunny On Daeus, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara Ryder and the team begin their incursion and explosive attack on the Kett presence on the stagnating planet of Daeus, striking a small refuelling station to steal a drop ship and move up to blast their way through the lumbering Kett Cruiser, with help from Sloane Kelley and her Exile strike force. Meanwhile, Director Jarun Tann discussed Salarian scouting and colonisation efforts with Pathfinder Hayjer, before Addison arrives with a grave development.

“Ryder!” Cora was shouting, coming running with Vetra and Drack as Sara and Peebee both checked each other for oxygen leaks in their masks and suits. Luckily there were no such complications. Their horribly rough landing had been a successful one.

She saw Cora and held up an open palm to get her to slow down and quieten herself as the blotchy foghorn noises of the lightning zapping down from the sky surrounded them. “We’re okay Cora! Any word from Tempest?!” Sara yelled into her helmet radio, through the intense upbeat of the thunderstorm. She and Peebee both got to their feet and the former brought out her Talon Sub-Machine Gun from her hip, checking the safety was off. It was time for shakedown and the trembling of Sara’s hands had only just moved past fear and into adrenaline-fueled focus. 

Cora slowed into a jog, reaching her Pathfinder and helping Sara up, dragging her and Peebee from the centre of the thundering field and to a small cliff face, the signal of the Kett stronghold beyond it a few clicks. “I got through to Suvi, they’ve had to bug out into low orbit to evade the fighters, but it looks like Sloane brought more than a transport. She’s got Exile Fighters attempting to take down the cruiser,” Harper reported, a gruff show of disdain in her voice as she told it. It was a reckless strategy, a foolish one, Sloane would lose too many fighters before she made a dent. 

Unless she was using Tempest as one massive distraction. 

“Bitch is using my ship to take the fighters away from the cruiser. Reckless bitch!” Sara cursed as she held her side. The fall had certainly wounded her and most probably caused a rib to crack, and it was already hurting like a bitch. Peebee was holding her side and whimpered as she felt the tensing of Sara’s gut and sides. They all looked to them, as Ryder was breathing a little heavily over the stabbing and pulsing feeling of fire in her bones. “I think I have a cracked rib.”

Drack snarled as he looked up into the sky. “Great we’re one woman down and we ain’t even started yet, now I’m getting pissed.”

“Simmer down old timer, save some testosterone for me,” Vetra called under her breath a little, only Cora really heard it as she checked out Sara. The omni-tool showed it, a cracked rib and intense strain on the muscles. Peebee was a little bruised too, on the small section of her tummy that was exposed under her purple jacket. This was looking grim now, getting gritty and Sara was burning with pain in her ribs. It hurt a lot, more than activating Remnant tech without SAM in her head. It was downright burning her insides away and felt like an internal fire of pain. 

Medi-gel was wrapped on her, what little they still used and it was enough to stifle the pain a little, but there was still a murmur of hurt deep in the bone. It was enough to allow Sara to get to her feet fully and catch her breath. She stood tall then, like a slightly tired Pathfinder, most of her energy spent on dulling the pain. 

Now came the time to formulate a plan, and get to the nearest Kett facility with all haste. There was no way to call the Nomad, and even with that, only three could fit in, it hardly seemed fair. So they were restricted to feet. And Cora was having doubts about this now, it was looking not worth it. Extraction could still be made and she was already willing to suggest it. 

“Okay, so scanners say Kett presence is a couple of clicks away?” Sara asked, cocking the safety again on her weapon and silently urging her girls and Drack to do the same. Vetra’s Cyclone Rifle was ready and out, ammo full and the spinning chamber well oiled and ready for killing with extreme prejudice. Vetra enjoyed her Cyclone very much. More so than she did the look of Cora’s shotgun, which was looking to do less good here, depending on how much biotics Cora was willing to use. Peebee’s pistol restricted her to back line support and suppression with some barrier usage to protect the team.

As for Drack. He was a walking weapon himself. All he needed was his hands. 

Both the krogan and Cora nodded at Sara’s question and pulled up omni-tools. Cora’s displayed a small hologram of the installation ahead, rather small, certainly not the main operations base but all could see the dropship hovering there. It instantly gave Sara a crazy idea that Peebee sensed instinctively through their small spiritual and mental connection since Melding. Drack’s readout was of the cruiser, the information of which was concurrent with the readouts of the Archon’s Flagship, which was muchly the same design and layout. The rest of the data came directly from SAM. The AI came over all their helmet radios, speaking to all. “Pathfinder and Team, I have scanned the structure and surrounding area of Daeus. It appears that the facility ahead is a small refuelling platform with one Kett drop ship and two fighters stationed. Resistance is expected to be within local ground militia as well as close quarters arms. No Remnant structures have been spotted so far aside from small caches. I recommend stealing the drop ship.” SAM told all and silenced himself again. 

Sara smiled. 

“I know exactly what we’re doing.” She voiced with a devious inflexion in the words. While the sound strategy would most probably be to take the drop ship to the main base on the planet, she had another option in her immature mind. 

“We’re taking the drop ship the main base right?” Vetra asked, the gravel of her dual tonal turian voice sounding ever so sweet and innocent. For a smuggler though she was thinking too much inside of the box. The box that Sara had shown time and time again as Pathfinder, that she was not restricted to. Cora simply glared at her through the glass visor of her standard issue Initiative Commando helmet. Peebee, however, knew what she had in mind. 

“No, Ryder wants us to take the dropship and dock with the cruiser, or crash into the hangar and fight our way to the bridge, then I’m guessing crash it?” Peebee explained for her girlfriend as Sara simply looked at the readout of the cruiser and smiled, then giggled villainously to herself as a child would. 

Vetra shook her head, lowering it in shame as Cora did the same. Peebee was neither sad nor enthusiastic about the idea, it was certainly an idea, but then again if she did judge her girlfriend, there were plenty of things Sara could say in retort. Such as the time Pelessaria technically kidnapped her and Vetra and launched them into an active volcano for Rem-tech. Although as the asari compared the two, it was apparent that crashing a ship into a planet with her girlfriend onboard was far worse. 

Drack was simply laughing slowly, as he did whenever he unleashed a load of carnage on some unsuspecting Exiles, usually when he charged through the wall to scare the shit out of them. This was going to be a story even for the ancient krogan, and he looked right at the young human. “You’re crazy kid. Scott’s gonna be pissed he missed this if we pull it off.”

Sara looked Drack in his elderly lizard eyes, thinking of Scott back on the Tempest. Suddenly she did not feel the smallest pang of guilt for not bringing him, it only made her judge Sloane’s reckless action for using the ship as bait. It had put Scott in harm’s way, as well as the crew, Liam, Jaal, Lexi and Suvi and Kallo and Gil. What was she playing at? Whatever she had told Sara she wanted must be worth it, it had to be, surely. She was playing one dangerous gambit if not. And if it wasn’t worth it, she’d have the Ryders to deal with. 

“Well, then ‘nough slackjawing, time we reached that Kett facility and stole the drop ship,” Cora suggested, picking herself up from the kneeling position that they had all taken to, as the falls of lightning continued to drop and bolt from the growing clouds. She hoped that one of them could fly a dropship in this weather. Luckily the cruiser was not that far away and ray-shielded against lightning strikes. 

Vetra and Drack stood up too, to join her, but Peebee, once fully elongated and limbering up her hands, wrists and neck joints, waiting for her human girlfriend. She pressed their foreheads together, her blue and sparkly skin failing to touch Sara’s forehead through the glass of the visor of the helmet. “I love you, Ryder. Don’t die please.”

Before she could answer, Sara got a beeping on her omni-tool and Peebee hoisted herself over the small edge to join the others in the small trek. The incoming call could only be from one person if not the usual address of the Tempest. 

“Sloane?” Sara asked into her helmet as she moved her behind too and up the small cliff, Talon drew and ready to shoot any Chosen or Anointed in their bony faces. Her memory shot to her shifty and back-handed dealing with the Primus on Eos, right before she turned her attention to the Archon and his faction. Sara remembered the split in the Kett Empire, and how now Archon was dead, they’d be dealing with the brunt of the Kett military structure, with Primus as the head honcho. “Sloane what do you want? We’re on Daeus already and working on your damn artefact,” Sara spat over the comm.

Kelley’s voice was as gruff as ever, no doubt the cruiser had turned its teeth away from her feeble fighter attempt and was looking to destroy her armed transporter. Something that small, even with cruise missiles and gun batteries at full charge wouldn’t last very long against a Kett ship. It raised the stakes a little in Sara’s mind as she saw her squad reach the base ahead, with Cora leading the charge and lighting the personnel up. “Let me guess Sloane, that Cruiser’s on you and you need our help?”

“Don’t act so cocky girl, with what I’m having you find for me, you’ll wish you had me on side Ryder.” Was Sloane’s vulgar response, in her cockney that made Sara’s stomach flip and churn from the impoliteness and the grittiness of it.

“First why? What the hell have you roped me into Sloane?” Sara demanded as she aimed her Talon and fired some covering rounds towards a small embanked gun battery that was peppering Vetra and Cora’s position. 

Drack was charging in ahead, ripping the Wraiths and the Chosen to utter ribbons, his bayonet from the shotgun he carried piercing carapace plate and tearing through bone and tendons. It was grisly and gruesome sight, but it was effective. Some minor Kett were even deterred from attacking and retreating from their cover. It was perfect for Peebee to suspend them in a small mass effect field with her biotics and let Vetra sweep them from the living world with a spool of her assault rifle. Sara could see why she had chosen this squad, as impromptu as Drack was, he was still ripping their flank to pieces as the valkyries pummeled their centre. The Anointed with chain guns were under pressure and once Sara entered the battle, controlling her shaking and using her focus to her advantage. She calmed her breathing and fired a concussive shot off, breaking through the shields of one of the big ones. Next, she threw a blob of dark energy via her biotic profile and then finished the bastard Kett off with a quickfire burst of rounds from her Talon.

Sloane’s laughter came into her ear once Sara honed into the other sources of sense around her aside from the battle. “Trust me, Ryder, you’ll want to be there when we all see,” Sloane told her, hearing the combat from Sara’s end now and wishing she was there. “Tell you what. You find that treasure, and I’ll invite you when I open the fucker. Deal?”

A random and feeble Chosen snuck around the side of the rock Sara was using for cover and knocked her right in her gut. She fell to the ground in agony from her fractured rib, feeling as if a splinter had speared off and pierced her lung. Instinctively she pulled out the asari sword from her back and lunged for the Kett. The blade stabbed right through its centre and Sara flipped back and up onto her feet with a light flutter of martial arts. Following up she grabbed the hilt of the sword and ripped it up through his body with her main hand while also firing round after round into his chest in her anger. 

“You still alive Ryder?” Sloane called in check to make sure she was, after the silence. 

Sara caught her breath, panting and pulling the sword from the Chosen’s chest; her own was lighting up like a blazing tower of flame it hurt so much from the whack of his rifle’s stock. “I’m… Here. Fucking Kett. Yeah Sloane,” she yelled, thinking she was speaking more quietly than she was. Another Chosen was charging for her she could see, and she didn’t even look at him as she shot him point blank in the centre of his carapace face. He fell back and straight like execution styled. “We have a deal. Get your transport away from the cruiser. We’ll take care of that too.”

Jarun Tann was meeting with Pathfinder Hayjer of the Salarian Ark, the Paachero, and discussing the possibilities of funding a mission to scout around Heleus for a habitable ground base for the Salarian Capital World in Andromeda. Hayjer was more than happy to begin the mission, in his eyes it had been too long a time of just sitting on the Nexus and not enough of actually breaking ground for another tomorrow. 

The rather inexperienced but spunky and enthusiastic Salarian Pathfinder was eager to start, and he and Tann were scouting local systems for viable possibilities. 

“Of course the planets that Ryder has established outposts upon are out of the parameters Director, those will have to remain independent,” Hayjer was explaining as they holographic map of Heleus was displayed on the table of Pathfinder HQ. It was the place that Tann often spent his working hours, surrounded by all the achievements that Sara Ryder had accomplished and he had taken credit for within the Nexus. Yet another reason why the rest of the Nexus leadership despised him with a passion. 

Tann didn’t care about that, he was conniving as he was civil and calculating. Even Hayjer, his fellow Salarian did not trust him at all fully and was looking at his rapid eye movement and blinking the whole time they were talking.

Jarun Tann was not blinking.

“At the very most Pathfinder, we shall put it to a democratic vote once all the interim ambassadors are elected and all species are represented,” Tann explained without even looking at Hayjer, he was looking into the outpost of Prodromos on Eos. Ryder’s first and biggest achievement it seemed, for it was still all anyone human was talking about. Anyone who was not on Meridian or a part of the Meridian Embassy. In the end, as the Moshae was elected to represent the Angara in Heleus, the humans were still debating about ambassadors for Meridian itself. 

Thus far on the Nexus, it was looking as if Addison or Kesh would represent the people on the station. Morda was already well into becoming the representative for the Krogan colony on Elaaden, and Sloane Kelley it was assumed would be the voice of the Kadaran people. 

Now Tann was wanting to look for a place for his own people, to set the webbed and amphibious feet down on and then he could begin roping them in to elect him as Salarian Ambassador. 

“Director, I believe that setting down our roots on a planet where Ryder established an outpost would be a bad move as a species, it would look tyrannical and could even go so far as to start a civil war again here on Nexus,” Hayjer explained methodically to Tann, with an edge of care in his voice, but also an inflexion of iron to show where his morals were and where he would stand on the topic. Not only because he was Paachero’s Pathfinder, and a member of the four, but also as a fellow of Tann’s species. He could already see what people had been criticising Tann of for over a year. He was too fast and too ambitious for his own good. 

He set his own wants and ambitions away from the goal of the Initiative, something Jien Garson would never do.

Tann said nothing in response to Hayjer’s sly warning, he simply kept looking at the readout of Heleus. With what had already been built it made his options a little limited, even with Meridian making numerous planets golden again. 

Kadara was a certain no go. Sloane Kelley would set his head on a spoke before the Salarians even made orbit and blast their colonial attempt out of space as she was beefing up the Port’s defences all the time. Eos was also a no, Bradley would not share the land with Salarians and the still desert-like environment made water a little scarce, more so than what the amphibians needed. That same factor barred Elaaden too, and Morda hated Tann and Salarians more than Kelley. Voeld looked a little promising, only it was declared as an Angara sovereign world, which barred any of species from making a sizable colony on it. 

There was nowhere already scouted that Tann could take out from the other species’ grasp… Except for one on his radar.

“Pathfinder Hayjer, have you been to Daeus yet?” Tann asked his colleague, curious and using the galaxy map to zoom in on the planet in question, the very rock ball that was currently ravaged by thunderstorms in the north. But Tann knew nothing about that. To him, it was still a promising world. 

Hayjer examined the world and shook his slim and fish-like head. “No Director, I cannot say I’ve heard of it yet. Should I have?” The Pathfinder asked, looking it over and seeing nothing special about it. From the data that Nexus had it looked like a suitable would in about a year, which was the estimated time it would take for the atmosphere to be fully overhauled to something breathable. But there were sizable water oceans, which were certainly hydrogen-dioxide. It looked optimal for Salarian settlement. 

“I think Daeus could be a viable planet if we maybe speed up the process a little and get some groundwork down there for settlement,” Tann told Hayjer, handing him some more dossiers and information packets about the planet before leaving the seat at the table and walking the Pathfinder around to the stairs. “I’ll work out the paperwork on my end Hayjer, you rally a team and report to Docking Bay Ninety-Four. You’ll have a transport waiting for you.” It was almost as if Tann was rushing him out all at once, and as soon as he saw Addison at the front desk with his assistant, her foot rapidly tapping on the bulkhead floor with a rather blotchy face that told him she had been crying, he was rushing Hayjer out.

“I’ll be in touch within the hour Hayjer, good luck.”

And before Hayjer was out the door, Addison was rushing her way up the stairs without word or authorisation and Tann had to keep up in his step to be with her. She was like something possessed. It was only one they reached the upper floor that Addison flicked on her omni-tool and planet a silencing spell over the box of the room so that Tann’s assistant and the cameras could not hear what they each had to say. 

“Tann. It’s Sloane.”

“Sloane? What does she want? Especially now? The Nexus has done nothing to Kadara to warrant her getting in touch with us,” Tann tried to rationalise and console himself, missing exactly what Addison was trying to tell him without explicitly spelling it out for him. 

“It’s not Kadara you bloody fool. She’s found it, and she knows that we both had a hand in it, Tann, once she gets it open all of this will come crumbling down, especially if Ryder finds out.” Addison was trembling just to say it, she was terrified, scared, more so than ever. Her strong stomach and back had been completely broken down and now she was just hoping Sloane would die before anything else. She had no idea what to do.

Luckily, or unluckily, Addison could not decide which, Tann knew exactly what to do. 

He waddled over to his desk, in the way all Salarians did with their inverted legs and reached to the intercom, the one that led to Kandros’s desk. “Kandros, I need an APEX Team suited up and ready for deployment and tracking, as soon as you can please,” he asked of the hardened turian down in the Operations Depot. 

Addison simply looked at him with wide and oblivious eyes. But she didn’t need to ask him what he was doing for upon Kandros’s affirmative he left the desk. “If Sloane Kelley threatens the security and stability of the Nexus, then as Director, I hold the authority to have her eliminated. 

“Sloane Kelley will have to be assassinated, Foster.”

Drack grabbed a Chosen by his angle and lobbed him keenly through the air and into the shield of an Anointed, which gave Sara just enough time to charge him over her panel of cover and shot three rounds into his face, enough to make his head detonate on demand. Peebee set up a moving barrier with her biotics around her girlfriend and Cora stuck with Drac, right behind him with her shotgun as they all advanced on the landing pad as a unit. Vetra was behind, cancelling the fueling operations on the dropship and arming the turrets all over the small base to attack their once masters. 

“Go! Go! Slot the pilot before he leaves!” Sara yelled as loud as she could over the erupting firefight. Drack spotted a small group of reinforcements and used his omni-tool to send three or so small orbs of incendiary tech towards them. The three exploded into flurries of fire, leaving the group in agony and prime for Pelessaria to send a shockwave of biotics to them, ending them in one fell swoop. 

Cora charged herself into the ship, at the open section, blasting cartridge after cartridge into the three Kett around her as they staggered from her charge. Then she leapt into the cockpit, hoisting her shotgun to her buttocks, and grabbing the Chosen’s neck between her soft and yet brutal arms. The sheen and squishy texture of her armoured arms made them seem more gentle than they were. But Cora was the strongest human on the Tempest and she snapped the Kett’s neck with expert precision. 

“I’ve never felt more like the commando since I left Thessia!” She laughed as she tossed out the body and one by one the squad boarded the dropship, with more Kett, mainly Destined and Chosen advancing to stop them. Veta smiled and her mandibles hummed under her helmet as she activated the newly configured turrets, and they began to mow the Kett down. 

Sara took the pilot’s seat and hooked up her omni-tool as quickly as she could, allowing SAM all the access to the drop ship he needed. “SAM do you work and get us to that Cruiser before we run outta time!”

“Acknowledged, Pathfinder.”

Peebee strapped herself in in the back, as Cora joined her with Sara behind. “Do anyone notice the incredible hard-on Cora has for Asari?” Peebee finally mentioned as it had been bugging her for months, all those times that Harper had done nothing but mention the species of mono-gendered space women with tentacles for hair. It was mildly disturbing as the youngest Asari on the ship.

“Finally someone asks the important question!” Vetra yelled as she hopped on the transport least, strapping in. Drack was standing, if they collided, it wouldn’t both him, he’d survived the Krogan Rebellions, anything else would be a minor flesh wound, even death he theorised.

Sara laughed, and Cora did nothing but snigger and smile as she looked at Peebee. “Relax Peebee, I know you’re off the market. Besides I already have my Asari, why else do you all think Lexi turns down Scott every time he asks her out on a date?” Cora teased. 

“You’re not serious right? No way you’re dating Lexi.” Sara called from beside Lieutenant Harper. “No way, just no, I cannot believe that Harper.”

Cora smiled, even more, tilting her head in the slyest manner she ever had. It was the biggest capacity for teasing she’d showed since Sara had met her. “Well, you know what they say, Ryder… A Commando never kisses another Commando and tells.”

They all laughed and screamed, unable to believe it as the dropship took off and zoomed through the storms to the cruiser. Where the real work would begin for all of them, and Sara was still reeling from the prospect that Cora was dating the ship’s doctor.


	4. It's Always Sunny On Daeus, Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara and team plough into the Kett Cruiser in an effort to take it down and advance to the location where Sloane Kelley believes lies the treasure she's looking for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to funk with the comments on this story as with all my stories because one child from Tumblr is being an idiot. Please leave any and all comments still if you wish.

Sara was almost splitting her sides looking out of the front cockpit window of the stolen Kett drop ship, smiling a toothy grin through the visor of her helmet. Once the laughter became rather audible, Vetra, Cora and Peebee all crammed their heads through the doorway to look out the window. The view Sara was laughing at, was a whole host of Kett Chosen and Anointed pointing Stoned and Thokin assault rifles at the coming ship. 

All three women looked Sara dead in her eyes, all judging her exponentially. “This was your idea, Ryder!” Cora bellowed in judgement. All Sara could do was shrug her shoulders and whip out her Talon machine pistol. This was going to become fairly messy unless they could whip up an advantage. 

“SAM, does this ship have any weapons on it at all? Or are we about to become paste?” Saa asked, seeing as SAM had completely control over all systems of the Kett drop ship. Just as she did she saw the waiting party of the Primus’s forces close the only bulkhead door leading from the hangar bay to the rest of the Cruiser. “Anything like a grenade launcher or a turret in the front?” Sara asked again as she felt the glares of her fellow women burning into the back of her skull. Her so-called plan had apparently led them to either death or capture, without an ace in the hole, and communication with Tempest was still a little out of reach with Kallo taking her into orbit.

It took a second for the AI to come back with a report. “Scanning… Negative, Pathfinder. The Kett drop ship possesses no offensive weapons currently.” Sara grew a little more fearful. “However, if you all bail out of the drop ship once we enter the hangar bay, I can fire the afterburners and ram the ship through a large section of the Cruiser, clearing a large portion of Kett and a route to the drive core. I would recommend staying away from the bridge.”

Then there it was, that was the plan. Bail and let SAM do the work before blowing up the drive core to smithereens. There was just one finer detail that Peebee had only just realised. 

“How are we going to bail before the whole ship crashes? I’d rather not die here,” she alerted them all, and Sara almost facepalmed again as she removed her helmet. The Kett ship had a source of oxygen, Kett had to breathe on that too as they were still carbon based lifeforms. Luckily that alert bounced another idea to Sara.

“Sloane, gonna need a moving pickup from inside the Kett Cruiser on my mark, if you want that artefact you’ll be there.” Sara threatened down her comm before getting up and moving to the larger compartment of the drop ship, they were coming into the hangar and no one aside from Drack was ready to leap off of the ship. Killing Kett had become the krogan’s favourite pastime since reaching Andromeda and he was pretty damn effective at it. Every scar in the shoulder plates of his sun-kissed and bonded armour represented a kill, and he was more than out of space. 

Kelley grunted her affirmation and before anything else could happen they crossed the threshold of the shield, and they were inside of the hangar. Ryder shouted to all to bail, and Drack leapt down first, battering his way through a Kett Chosen that flew through the shield and down into the storms. The krogan war machine was chuckling and cackling to himself proudly. “It’s your lucky day tater-tots! Grandpa Drack came to plaaaaay!” He bellowed as she rampaged through another cluster of little Kett, as Cora came in with her shotgun, popping one round into each and silencing them. Vetra and Peebee doubled up, the latter peppering the back ranks with shots from her Sidewinder and orbs of biotics in form of Throw, Pull and Singularity, which helped tremendously. 

As the members of the team all picked their targets and executed an all-out surgical attack on those littered all over the hangar bay, SAM took control of the drop ship and fired the afterburners. The green slab of Kett metal and thrusters picked up speed from the hovering stance it had taken just inside the hangar and thundered across the room. Sara’s mouth was agape with shock and awe as the ship glided across for a few feet and then plummeted down with all speed into the far ended bulkhead, colliding and blasting, tearing through the alloy with a crunching and booming thud. There was a very odd noise that followed, something Sara had never heard as a scientist and certainly not during her time as an Alliance Peacekeeper. It was all new and that perhaps made it fall all the more incorrectly on her shocked ears. It was a careening whirl, sounding as if a tropical tree was falling to lumberjacking. It was horrid, sickly to Sara and it made Peebee pull a wrong face, and the Kett ran and hit the deck for their lives, all tossing weapons down and running deeper into the ship in retreat before long. In the aftermath, Drack and Vetra looked at the devastation, and there was a wave of it. Bodies numbering almost a fifty all laid out around the destroyed and busted hangar, all dead and some even in pieces and broken chunks of their carapace. It was ghastly. 

Cora threw up, she had to, where she stood, all over her own boots she could not control it. In all her years of being a commando with the Asari strike force, she had not yet seen something so utterly devastating as this, and the green blood of the mixed bag of Kett had practically painted the entirety of the hangar floor.

“Ugh, Cora! Keep it in your stomach! Yuck,” Peebee whined, sticking out her tongue and feeling the need to chunder all over the floor in addition. If she had actually eaten something other than the soda ration they had on Tempest that morning, she probably would have. 

The blonde commando had to wipe her mouth with the slip of her armour, she felt disgusting and thus did it behind the squad as they all looked to the burning hole in the middle of the rather large wall. “Uh, SAM, when you told me that plan, I didn’t expect results quite like that,” Sara commented, rather moonstruck still and standing plainly with Peebee beside her. “We definitely need a vacation after this one.” She followed. 

“I aim to please Pathfinder, would you like me to alert Nexus control as to the shore leave request?” SAM asked, his whole reach now only embedded within Sara herself and the Tempest. He was no longer in the remains of the Kett drop ship. 

“Uh, sure, we could all use a freaking break lately and Prodromos has a communal pool now I think. Whee the engine room SAM? And how many more Kett can we expect?” Sara asked her AI counterpart again, pulling the Talon from his belt and reloading. The others did the same, Drack looting some spare thermal clips from the Kett corpses. It had truly been a bloodbath and finally, they were about to assault the rest of the hulking behemoth. 

Kett Cruisers were a lot larger than Alliance ships back in the Milky Way, and Turian ships too for that matter, however, their fleets were mostly comprised of fast attack and assault frigates, as per the Turian method of warfare; destroy the enemy with overwhelming force before they can know what hit them. Frigates were the best ship for the job, able to break cruisers and dreadnoughts and destroy the rebel world with quick and mostly clean efficiency. Kett ships obviously did not play by the same ship rules and regulations in the Andromeda Galaxy. Their ships were about twice as large as anything in their class back in the Milky Way. And they had been as terrifying up close every time a team of fighters, Initiative or Angaran, had gotten as close to them.

“I am detecting some small armed resistance gathering near aft damage control Pathfinder, in an effort to stop you, but they are few in number and there is a side path through the Exaltation Chamber--”

“Wow, hold up, there’s a Chamber on the ship?” Vetra interrupted to ask in her horror. 

“Indeed, that path offers less resistance, and may also contain a main networked computer for me to access the entire ship, that way I can make your escape a lot easier and possibly even control the descent of the vessel into the main Kett base on Daeus,” SAM informed them, making a note to amplify the scanner of Sara’s omni-tool to outline the engine room and the exaltation room through the walls of the ship in a bright and blinding orange. 

Sara pointed out the path to the chamber, and one by one, starting with Drack they all moved passed the fiery wreckage of the destroyed drop ship and meandered into the cave of bent and broken metal, with a slight hissing of air mixing. It was the cracks in the main bulkheads and the atmosphere of the planet mixing with the oxygen aboard the vessel. Sara slipped her helmet on once again and gave her asari girlfriend a nudge. “Helmets on people, air’s mixing,” Ryder called and they did as ordered. 

“Wait surely that means the whole ship’s coming apart right?” Peebee asked, the one with the least amount of knowledge of physics and ship building. 

Vetra spoke up once her oxygen seal was in place with a high-pitched squeal in her ears. “Nah, would take another ship crashing into the other hangar bay to create the force big enough and in the right place for the cracks to apply the pressure. Either that or there’s a bomb aboard close to this area of the ship.”

“Just nobody step on something they’re not supposed to,” Grandpa Drack told the party behind him as the hallways went dark and the creaking of the ship was the only noise aside from the hum of the engine and the occasional pulse of the batteries firing. It was a little unnerving and unsettling, but not for the krogan. “I’d rather not be falling through a thunderstorm with debris raining with me.” He finished, swallowing down his rusty and aged throat. The man was so old, at this point, his blood must have been a fine wine. 

Cora kept her eyes front and giggled just a little. It took the lulling laughter a full minute down the dark and cluttered hallways to the Exaltation Chamber to address and it was Peebee, of course, who yelled at the commando. “What the goddess are you laughing at Cora?”

“Oh! Me?” Cora asked, showing a lot more emotion and incredulousness in her otherwise bland southern U.S voice. “I was just thinking, the other week when we busted out all the booze rations we got from Vortex thanks to Ryder when Scott had that fifth of whisky out of the bottle and was flirting with me all night?” She left hanging to ensure they were all following. It had been one hell of the night, and Scott Ryder had topped out on just a fifth of the bottle of whisky before the party had really even got going, Vetra and Sara had had the funniest time shaving half of his eyebrow off and then taking to his upper lip with a marker. All in all, he had ended the night looking slightly balder above the eyes and with a moustache and matching phallus in the same shade of marker black. 

They all grunted or sounded off in an affirmative which gave Cora the signal to explain why she was laughing still. 

“Well, because my implant in kinda supercharged, it means I don’t get hangovers, so when I said I couldn’t remember anything he’d said to me, I was totally lying. And I’ve been messing with his holo-journal and locker all week writing shit,” Cora giggled like a schoolgirl. It was amazing and so strange, ever since Meridian had been claimed as Humanity’s stake in Andromeda, it had seemed like Cora had become a completely new a different person. She actually had personality now and a sense of humour, and had lightened up a whole bunch, which all could say was a needed change, even Jaal. 

They all giggled with a shock of disbelief. Since Scott had come aboard, Cora had turned her sass to a new level and every time the younger Ryder had attempted to flirt with her, she’d slammed the door on him so brilliantly. Even Sara was taking notes just in case she ever met Reyes Vidal again. 

“Man I swear, if Sloane is grateful that we’re taking the time to destroy this ship by the time I meet her next, I am going to shoot her,” Sara grunted, having Reyes make her think of Sloane again, it was if she was slowly becoming infatuated with her. Only Sara’s taste in women was far better that Sloane. 

“You’re not gonna shoot her Ryder.” Peebee corrected her so plainly. 

“Well, not in so many bullets… But I’m going to be pissed if she’s not grateful. She’s like an abusive ex, I just keep going back…”

Sloane Kelley looked over the command room of her small but effective command frigate, a brutish and haphazard thing barely even cobbled together from spare starship parts salvaged day after day since she took over Kadara Port from the now oppressed Angara there. She had taken to call it the ‘Falcon’ and it served its purpose. It stored a couple of fighters via maglocks and contained a small FTL for her to get from Kadara to the rest of the cluster in relative time. But it was far too small and much too inelegant to anyone else. If Reyes was in charge he’d surely vomit as soon as he laid eyes on it. But for Sloane, it was the making of her own fleet, in her own awful design. 

She was a warmonger in the making. 

“Sloane. It looks like Ryder and her team have the cruiser handled,” the turian serjeant at Sloane’s side announced, drawing her attention to the readout of the massive Kett ship that was taking place in the hologram circle. “I’m seeing some damage readings along the inside bulkheads and their life signs show them heading aft.”

The hardened woman with the scar across her face examined the hologram carefully, her rapid eye movement showing the intense and intricate readouts being calculated in her mind. She was not an unintelligent woman. In fact, Sloane was one of the most clever and strategically driven minds that had come with the Initiative, and her mutiny had been such a loss to their Nexus. But she did so, for her own reasons, and the list was long. Atop it was a massive ‘fuck-you’ to Jarun Tann. 

“They’re heading right for the engine room, to blow up the reactor and power couplings that feed the lift and propulsion systems. The fucker'll fall flat on its arse. She’s smarter than I give her credit for that one,” Sloane mumbled to herself for a moment, even smiling smugly at the blinking red dots that represented Sara and her band of renegades. “She’s wasting her time licking Tann’s balls. I could make her fucking immortal.” She grunted to her turian aide. He nodded to himself, not affirming her pass nor negating it. Sloane had not talked about Sara in such a manner before, for even during the Battle for Meridian, she had not seen firsthand what Ryder could do. And now, when staring down the length of a Kett Cruiser, with a heavily desired treasure at the end of the trail, Sloane finally saw what she wanted to see in Sara Ryder. 

Kelley walked down from the readout suite and jaunted down the length of the small combat information centre and to the helm. “All ahead full and light up the aft section of that bastard ship like it’s the end of the fucking year people. Avert what fighters I’ve got left kicking to do the same, cripple the fucker.” She ordered with a clench of her fist. It was utter nonsense, firing on the very section of the ship that Sara and team were heading into, that they were going to destroy.

Only in Sloane’s mind, it was trial by fire. Ensuring that Sara could stand up to Sloane’s own heat. It was also pure madness. 

The fighters and the ship itself towed Sloane’s line, following her orders and engaging with the Kett Cruiser in an explosive partnership of fire and exchanged blows from the minor gun batteries of the Exile Frigate and the Cruiser. Plumes of flame erupted from the side and the aft sections of the greenly steeled ship as Sloane Kelley guided her people and ship around like an antagonised hornet, exposed in a heatwave and trying to be swatted. But the Kett were already in such a disarray there was no coming back. Sara and the Tempest team had managed to deal so much internal damage, the command structure was falling apart inside and then Sloane’s attacks was splitting them down and ripping them apart. Any section inside that was not on fire or crumbling to the piercing arms of the frigate were filled with orderless Chosen and Anointed. The tanned Sloane’s eyes squinted with pride and vigorous lust for the violence befalling ahead of her on through the helm window panels and then on the holographic display. 

“I fucking live for this,” Sloane mumbled to herself with a very harsh filter on her usual vulgar voice. 

Deep inside the cruiser, Sara and her team ran from jets and plumes of flames erupting from the various stations that were overloading from the damage. Vetra and Peebee were doing their best to keep the bulkhead doors behind them closed and those ahead open fast enough. The Exaltation Chamber was behind them and the main engine compartment was only a few more rooms ahead, but they were exhausted, and SAM had alerted the Pathfinder to Kett fortifying ahead near the drive core. 

“You know it’s going to explode with a mighty big bang if we blow it up,” Drack reminded Sara as they caught their breath for a small second. The explosions were subsiding for the moment and the bulkheads were sealed. Not that they were even doing much in ways of protection. Twice had Cora almost lost her head to a girder or slice of metal coming loose from the room they were in at the time. 

Drack was a little wheezy, enough to make Vetra turn her turian head and flick her mandibles back and forth with expert concern, the usual telltale sign of turian feeling some excitement or distress. “You getting tired old timer?” She asked, a very obvious inflexion of care and concern in her dual tonal vocals. Vetra’s voice was one of the purest and loving Sara had ever heard, but when the turian smuggler was sad or feeling some negative emotion, it was so easily heard in her voice. 

The old krogan stood up straight, grumbling like so many ancient men who refused to admit they were getting old. “I’m fine Vetra, just a little… Overextended.”

“Take it, easy grandpa, it’s okay we have time,” Sara told him, standing up herself and checking the ammunition count on her Talon before walking to him and placing a hand on his arm. She wanted him to be okay, and to be healthy. Lexi had been expressing more and more annoyed frustrative concern lately, and now Sara could see why. Drack was suddenly looking pale. 

He grumbled again, more like a predatory snarl like a lion. 

Sara did not press any further, instead, she simply holstered the submachine gun and pulled up her omni-tool. “SAM? How much longer? And is Sloane finished trying to kill us?” She asked the AI in her brain and overlooked the readout of the ship once more. The Cruiser looked a little different, missing a lot of the main armaments and having huge chunks of it missing from the strafing run of the frigate. Now was the time to escape, it had to be. 

“I detect the engine console I need to be in the next room, Pathfinder. However, I must advise you to ensure you have enough ammunition. There are multiple Kett incoming, I believe they know what we are up to.” SAM reported in his usually relaxed voice. It was making Sara a little annoyed over how his tone never changed from perfect zen while she and her team were so exhausted and ready to drop, she couldn’t help her frustration.

Cora nearly kicked the solid steel walls while flailing about her shotgun. This was getting ridiculous but there was only one more hurdle. “You heard him people, get ready for an upload, I’ll plug SAM into the system and we’ll defend while he shuts down the drive core.”

Peebee looked to her girlfriend with eyes that were a little desperate. “And then we get outta here right?”

“Then we get the hell outta here.”

Drack and Vetra tore the final door open with a grenade followed by the krogan charging through the withered and charred remains of the metal. He ripped right through three more Kett and allowed Cora and the turian to use him as a shield, walking in tactically and firing a plethora of rounds down range, plugging more and more of the bone carapace enemies. “Go! Go! Take ‘em out quick!” Sara ordered from the centre, muscling her way in and firing short bursts from her machine pistol into the resisting Kett bodies. Their aim was shoddy and all over the place but Drack took some hit to his shield. He found the Anointed and lobbed a chain of sticky grenades onto him. His body went up like a firecracker in a beautiful blue flame. Pop. Pop. Pop. Drack laughed manically and pulled his shotgun back around to blast the smaller Kett with some incendiary rounds. They all lit up spectacularly as the team soon pushed past the command console Sara needed. 

She crouched behind it and got to work wiring SAM into the section of code she needed altered. “Okay SAM shut it down now,” she ordered her friendly AI before dashing to another cover as the rest of her squad did so. Peebee leapt to be beside her and they exchanged flirtatious winks and smirks. SAM sounded off his position and began the hack into the Kett ship. 

“Sloane!” Sara shouted down comms as Drack, Vetra and a very uncomfortable Cora ripped through the rest of the defending Kett. “We’re hacking in now! Get that extraction ready or there’s no deal!”

“Pathfinder, I am detecting additional Kett reinforcements as well as a Prefect en route. I suggest readying yourself.” SAM interrupted, which made Sara punch the metal sheet of the table that was her new cover. Peebee gripped her hand and quickly kissed her cheek in a desperate move to centre the both. The mild flicker of a meld was present and it snapped Sara out of her funk, but now all she wanted was to hold Pelessaria in her arms and kiss her unrelentingly. The sensation of bonding with her was so intoxicating, worse than red sand. 

“Here they come!” Cora shouted back to Sara and stood in her cover to begin peppering the additional Kett. Drack helped too while Vetra eyed up the floating Prefect with his stable shield and began to suppress, allowing Sara and Peebee to take him down with tech, biotics and bullets. 

The orb was such an annoyance, like all that Sara and her team had encountered. At the Exaltation facility, on board the Archon’s Flagship, in the bases on Voeld and Eos, and then at the Remnant City. It took so long to whittle them down to light those inside them ablaze with fire and blood. Sara even screamed as she emptied her clip and reloaded, the whole while Peebee was supporting her with lances and biotic orbs thrown at the orb. As Vetra kept him stationary with her Cyclone assault rifle and Cora and Drack dispatched the rest of the Kett around them. Shields popped a few times but the ancient krogan would charge in and take a few more holes in him. One round nicked through his entire bicep, making his arm spasm and his muscle contort with pain, but he kept going, holding the Chosen’s head and arm and tearing him apart. 

“I love this job sometimes!” Sara heard Drack cry out in his granite-like voice. It was stone grinding upon stone over the hail fire of bullets and ballistics in the air, all rattling around. She was beginning to get nervous as it was taking SAM so long to dissect the code and execute a shutdown call on the drive core. 

“Try harder old man!” Sara called back with a smile as she stole a quick kill from his fingers by rifling a round into his target’s head smugly. 

She was standing and all that came next was Peebee’s voice screaming in her ear. “Ryder!” She cried.

Sara spun around right as a Kett's fist was coming right to her face. Quickly she dodged and twirled, using him as a balance, and then equally as quickly did she beat him with the small stock of her rapid fire weapon, only to finish by activating her omni-tool, the blade function and unsheathing it. He was turning his head fast enough just to see Sara plunge her orange blade deep into his back, with a second coming for his neck. And all too easily Sara had cut him down right in front of Peebee, saving her. The martial arts lessons of the last few weeks from Cora had paid off. 

As Sara finished her foe, Vetra managed to move from suppression to an out-right attack on the Prefect, breaking his orb and dismantling his shield. One it popped, all five of them spun barrels in his direction and all at once lit him up. He was done for and soon stopped floating and hit the floor in a pool of green and sickly yellow blood. It was ghastly and again did Cora vomit. Something was wrong with her certainly. 

“Pathfinder. The hack is complete.” SAM told her and she bolted for the console. 

“Shut it down SAM! Everyone on me and run!” Sara screamed, holstering her machine gun and running for the door, grabbing Peebee’s gloved hand as she did. And then the race was on, to get to the remaining hangar bay before the entire ship became a deadweight of Kett machinery. “Move!” She shouted as the hum of the drive core came to a sudden and violent stop and the circuits inside the walls exploded and sparked the surge or sudden lack of power. It all failed and the ship began to stop floating above the ground of Daeus. 

Outside it all grew dark and every gun battery stopped firing. The sudden draw was too great and the ship could not compensate. It began to stop floating and stop moving, suddenly coming to a rocking glide as the cockpit dipped. 

It was falling and it was falling hard to the planet’s surface.


	5. It's Always Sunny To Be Jarun Tann

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara and Peebee are finally led by Sloane to the treasure she seeks on Daeus, while Tann and Addison put in motion a plan that will change everything that has been accomplished since arriving in Andromeda.

The doors to the Kett holding base tore open like a sheet of filing paper with Sloane kicking her way in with a shotgun blasting off, its rounds even ricocheting off of the walls and into the bodies of the flailing Kett Chosen and Destined. “Now this is something I missed!” She roared at the top of her lungs as Sara and Peebee and Drack all flooded into the room. Cora and Vetra had been picked up by the Tempest now that the Kett Cruiser was out of commission.

The massive hulk of greenly coloured metal was currently a wreck, still exploding almost a hundred kilometres away. Sara had decided she had to see what Sloane wanted so much, and Peebee would not leave her alone with the ravenous warmongering Sloane. Drack just did not want the fun of Kett slaughter to end so suddenly. He had to keep killing the blighters. 

It hardly took them all too long before the last of the Kett resistance was eradicated before them and the room of what looked to be treasures was void of alien life aside from Asari, Krogan, Humana and Turian. There were several smoke trails coming from the walls and the holes of superheated metal and even laser rounds that had melted their way through the metals. No smell came from the blood and the guts spilt from the Kett bodies, and if it did, Sloane was eager to bask in it as she slowly surveyed the room, judging if it was still okay to let Ryder see what she was about to uncover. 

“Come on Sloane, what the hell are we risking our asses for here?” Drack asked this time, beginning to wonder himself what the woman was so hellbent on trying to find. If it required the destruction of a Kett warship, the boon had to be plentiful. 

“Relax gramps, you’ll see soon enough,” Sloane alluded, causing Sara’s face to slump and her shoulders to almost fail entirely. “Although I have to warn you, Ryder… If my hunch is correct, and what I’m looking for is here, it’s going to compromise you and everything you’ve worked so hard to build since arriving in Andromeda.”

“Why?” Sara asked, stopping in her tracks with a slack jaw. Those sudden words of warning sent mild chills up and down her spine until she felt a very alarming brand of cold come over her. Sloane’s tone and all that Sara could think of was worrying. She suddenly thought of Scott, and of her ship, her friends, family. Of Meridian, Hyperion, the Pathfinder teams. She thought of Kesh, Kandros, Addison… And Tann.

‘Don’t fucking trust Tann.” 

That was what Sloane had said to her during the first transmission hours ago. In all the fighting and trying to survive Sara had completely compartmentalised it. And only now did it mean anything to her in her sparkling mind. What was Sloane about to show her? Why did it matter to Tann? What did Tann matter to this? How was anything connected between Daeus, and Nexus that was hundreds of lightyears away?

Suddenly Sara flipped and lunged at Sloane. She actually managed to grab her head and arm, pushing the former against one of the walls, pushing her whole arm up her back and stabbing her with the barrel of her Talon machine pistol. Sloane’s men sprang to action and guns were pointed right at Sara as she breathed down Sloane’s tensing neck. Drack had his shotgun ready to atomise the rebels and Peebee had her hand raised with a dark matter ball of biotics in the middle of her palm. The room when silent in a grave bubble of tension. Any moment Sara did anything and she would die, then so would the men. 

“What the fuck are you doing Ryder?” Sloane asked in a very unimpressed tone of grunting pain. Her arm was rapidly growing numb and inflamed. Any more movement up her spine and it would swell and dislocate. 

Sara pushed the barrel of her weapon deeper into Sloane’s skull. “Why the fuck shouldn’t I trust Tann, Sloane?” She asked, in an even more unamused voice than her folly. 

“Because he’s a spineless Salarian bastard who’s in charge of Nexus through a proxy?” Drack asked. 

“Because he’s literally the personification of untrustworthy!” Peebee asked also. Both she and the krogan did not see why Sara was asking such an obvious answer. Tann was untrustworthy to a tee, and no one trusted him, not even Addison seemed to seriously trust the slimy looking salarian. 

Sara didn’t listen, and all Sloane did was smile, baring her ugly teeth as she became elated that Ryder couldn’t figure it out. They had even talked about it, a while ago, when Sara was plodding along through the series of her father’s encrypted memories. When she had uncovered the truth behind Jien Garson’s murder. Sara pressed the barrel deeper into Sloane’s hairline and both their bodies grew warm and tense together. Their arms were rigid and faces pressed as if trying to detonate their bodies through force of sheer will. Both were stubborn hotheads, but this was incredulous. 

“Tell me, Sloane! Why shouldn’t I trust Tann?! Why should I trust you?” 

“Because if they uncover anything about what we hid Foster, Ryder and her entire team, in fact possibly all of the Pathfinder Division will have exceeded their usefulness and will press into being pawns of Sloane Kelly and enemies of Nexus,” Tann told Addison with a cold and clinical voice, surgical in how pronounced his syllables and the harsh consonants. It was sickly, coercing Addison to want to vomit. The stretching and yoga she had performed that morning were now void having been exposed to Tann so much. He was making her sickly. 

“This is Ryder we’re talking about! We can’t just assassinate the Human fucking Pathfinder!” Addison bellowed at him, flailing her fists about, her temper flaring up worse than an unstable planet. She was right, no matter what, there was no way they could kill her. 

Tann huffed, folding his arms as the holographic readout of the Tempest spun gently above the table between them. She was the one who came to him, about Sloane, and suddenly Tann was talking about destroying the ship along with the entirety of her crew. 

He was suddenly convinced that Sloane was turning Ryder against the Nexus. 

“Foster, if they uncover what you think Sloane has found, it will spark a Civil War. Even worse if they break the news the public of the Nexus.” 

“If Sloane’s found what I think she has Tann, then we’ll have to stand down and be subject to criminal charges. What we did were mutiny, treason and attempted murder, there’s no coming back from that.” Addison tried to tell him, calming down and becoming more scared than angry at him. She was gradually, although rapidly, becoming very paranoid and terrified for her life. 

The salarian huffed once again, looking out of the window to the nebula and then back at her, placing the palms of his three fingered hands carefully and precisely on the desk. “What we did, Colonial Director Addison was for the good of the Nexus and for the Initiative. The mutiny was already in effect by the time we chose to carry out the actions we did. Treason is not a crime in Andromeda for there is no current governing body, we are a civilian expedition. And it was not attempted murder if we and everyone else thought she was already dead,” he told her, again calmly and as clear as he possibly could, again making sure to pronounce every single syllable and letter so that they landed on Addison. 

She was not looking to be having any of it. Instead, Addison looked far away, reclusive into her own mind, deep in the catacombs of her grey matter. 

“Damnit, Foster! I need your approval here to make this an executive decision!” He snapped at her to grab her and pull her back to reality. 

“You mean to have your conscience clear if they actually manage to kill her?” Foster snapped back, still holding her own chest with her cold and fearful arms. She was so deeply scared now, and not just of the situation but of Tann himself.

There was a slight second of silence for a moment, with Addison weighing her options and the situation around in her head, the unpredictability of Sloane and the calculated coldness of Tann. The tenacity of Ryder and the volatile nature of the Initiative’s stake in Andromeda itself. So many areas and so many numbers all feeding into one massively big fact: what was done was done and now she was already so far down the hole Foster Addison knew that it would be better to close it completely and as quietly as possible than to try and open it fully again with a public spectacle and ordeal. It would ruin everything if the populace found out what had been done. If she started a flame here and now, it would consume the entire Initiative… Or so she had come to think. 

“Addison. I need a decision here. And I highly hope you intend to keep the integrity of the Initiative afloat here with your response.” Tann asked one final time, his eyes black and completely void and emotionless. 

Foster gritted her teeth, taking the small datapad from his side of the table and jotting down her signature on the intended line. “The integrity of the Initiative no longer exists Tann. But I will do what I can to keep the dream alive for those who still believe in it,” she told him straight, before tossing the datapad onto the table and walking out. Her pride and her shame were in tatters and all she could do as she knew Tann would use her signature to set in motion a plan to destroy the Pathfinders. Not just Ryder, Tann would consolidate his power and kill them all. 

Hayjer was nabbed in the Docking Area on Deck 67, two shadow agents of the APEX force slashed at his legs in an alleyway after luring him there by means of a distraction drone. He stood no chance for them, even as a Pathfinder they had his tactical layout matched and had shortcircuited him from yards away. 

The operatives were dressed in civilian clothing, with hoods up, blended into the normal crowds of the ever expanding population of the Nexus with more and more people boarding shuttles to one of the many outposts and prototype colonies. Eos and Prodromos were becoming one of these. 

Sarissa they had trouble with, on another deck on the station, but they soon cut down her loyals and her second, with knives and small arms, but the asari and their biotics were enough to fend them off. Sarissa caught a last minute shuttle and escaped the interior of Nexus, only to be shot in the back half before they managed to slip to FTL. 

As for Rix, he was nowhere to be found. 

Sloane finally had it, she pressed with her free hand against the wall, spun around Sara and pulled her own hand cannon from the holster on her belt. Before anyone could realise what was happening, Sara’s gun was pointed at Sloane’s face, and vice versa, with Peebee’s back, turned to the men and her own Sidewinder pressed where the Talon was. The back of Sloane’s skull. “Okay, drop it, sweetie, we’ve had enough of this now,” Pelessaria announced to the warmonger she was currently aiming at. Drack was snarling and smiling to the rest of the company, just wishing they would enrage him and give him reason to rip them apart. Although as he eyed up the numbers he could see now that Cora would have been smart to come along too. 

“Tell your slut to put hers down before I send one barreling through that pretty face of hers,” Sloane grunted back to the asari behind her. It did both test Sara and earned a smirk from her at the same time.

“Well, at least you think I’m pretty after all. Come on Sloane just tell us what we’re here for before someone gets hurt,” Sara tried to bargain, her tone changing to one of a diplomat, empathetic and understanding. She was trying so hard to reach a settlement, where guns could be lowered; she was exhausted and even her anger and immaturity had subsided. 

“That’s all we want to know… Is why we’re here,” Sara moaned a little, in a submissive and relenting voice, giving all her emotional capacity over to Sloane though their locked eyes. She was trying her hardest to get that Sidewinder to lower and for Sloane to tell them. 

And she did. She lowered her hand cannon and smiled, chuckled even as Sara and Peebee did the same at the same time. Drack was the least after the regiment of Turians and Humans did as their commander. 

“Alright then Ryder, I guess you’ve earned that much, you and your little band by taking out that ship for me. But like I said, once I show you it’ll destroy all you’ve worked so hard to build,” she told Sara again, so seriously this time, her words as clearly spoken as Tann would say them. And Sara and Peebee both could tell that Sloane meant them. This revelation of hers was going to throw everything into flux and out of whack. Sara had to breathe carefully to mentally prepare herself. 

They walked a little more into the base, as the Exile Slicers cracked the locks on all the doors and let them move about freely. Kett were surrendering and being shot in the back of their carapace heads all over the place by ruthless Turians and some angry Angara as Sloane and her personal guard led them all down to the detention level on the schematics. “Pathfinder, we’re here at the landing pad, Tempest all repaired and ready to dust off when you give the word, sorry for the comms during that fight.” Kallo Jath transmissioned over omni-tool to Sara. She sighed a welcome relief, all was okay again with her mobile family and Peebee was holding her hand rather tightly. They were in the shrouded presence of thieves, vagabonds, murderers and mutineers but Sara Ryder and her little family were safe and sound for the moment. 

But they were completely oblivious to what had happened on the Nexus. 

Finally, they reached the detention centre, which was completely empty aside from one article of curiosity that struck Sara as completely dumbstruck, while also making Sloane grin like a Cheshire Cat. It was a Nexus Cryo Stasis pod, a little damaged but with ample power supply. And from the light on inside and around the pod, it looked like someone was alive and frozen inside like some of the meat that had been transported too. 

“Sloane who the hell is in there?” Sara asked, wary and terrified suddenly as to who it was and why the Kett had them on some planet in the middle of nowhere. 

Sloane moved to the pod and took a reading, with her Technical Advisor and some more personnel. They were looking over the pod from top to bottom and suddenly growing a little frantic about the condition. “It’s leaking power Sloane! She’s not going to make it here we need power!” A turian with his omni-tool lighting up like a Christmas tree told he. 

“Alright, you mugs get her up and get her up now!” Sloane roared at them with a temper unlike any that Sara had ever seen from the mutinous warmonger. She did give no allusions to even notice Ryder or Peebee, Drack was waiting up the stairs for them in case all went sideways. 

There were a circle and a mess of shouting and techs coming to salvage the pod and try and pry it open. Sara had seen it before in Scott, and without an Ark or the medical personnel of the Initiative, there was no way they could save whoever was inside the cryo pod. But Sloane was even kicking the think trying. More and more men and women with tools and equipment came tumbling down the stairs and eventually did Sloane notice Ryder and Peebee just standing idly by in the corner. 

“Ryder get the fuck outta here!” Sloane growled and blew at her. There then came a flurry of arguing between men and women behind her as the pod failed a little further. 

“You told me you’d tell me!” Sara shouted back, distracting Sloane again. 

“I will just get out of here! I’ll be in touch!” Kelly told them before directing two guards to drag the women up and out of the room. They were gone before long after a flailing bout between Sara and Peebee with the Krogan who were taking them from the duress area. And then they were back out with Drack. 

It was all happening so fast, and Sara was so angry, nothing seemed to make sense anymore she was just so tired. It was all a blur suddenly in her mind as she tried to recall it. 

But there was one thing she remembered seeing on the pod as she had looked. Something blurred on a side readout panel. Something that looked insanely like the word ‘Director.’ And then nothing made sense to her anymore. 

“Director…” Sara told herself. 

“What Ryder?” Peebee asked in her own confusion. 

“The pod said Director… Director Jarun Tann…”


	6. It's Always Sunny On Eos, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara and Peebee finally enjoy some long overdue down time and sexual play after the nightmare that was the mission to Daeus, with Sara getting back to her old self and not worrying too much about missions and the wellbeing of her team over everything else. Shore leave helps settle the most nervous of commanders and quality time with Peebee makes for a beautiful morning. Meanwhile, Jarun Tann and Foster Addison discuss the failure of APEX teams in killing both Sara and Sloane and what could be leaked from that failure. Tann loses his temper and Addison decides her role in this game is the wrong one. She has been playing both sides and decides that Tann must be stopped, realising her mistake far before it is too late. But does she still have a chance to save herself and the other girls? And what does Sloane have inside the cryostasis pod? Addison already knows.

Sara woke up about a week later, from yet another night in bed with Pelessaria B’Sayle, her beautiful blue cheeks pressed into the softness of the single pillow as she remained under while Ryder woke up from the stale heat seeping through the ventilation. Becoming accustomed to Eos’s climate for a long winded amount of time was something Sara did not think she would have to do but the crew had suggested this place over Eladen and Voeld simply for the milder and yet habitable climate. Eos was the better option now that Prodromos was expanding into more and more of a township than a single settlement. 

The people under August had progressed much in the past few months, with added support and resources and manpower from Meridian, the township was pushing against its own borders and a lot of construction had been erected. There was a bazaar that was being formulated in the middle of the large open space on the embankment. It was raving from early hours in the morning until the dead of night. And not just Initiative personnel were here now. The Turians had officially set up an Embassy near what was rapidly becoming the Affairs District on the far side of town, with the Angara doing the same with lush and verdant building decorated with an all manner of desert flowers and flora. It looked like a neo version of the Russian Kremlin only with a forest growing all over it. It was actually managing to gather some small representation of a tourist base in the form of hopeful Initiative colonists wanting to take time off to visit the Ryder Outposts. 

The middle of the basin was still consumed by a small industry and water processing plant and they were finding such luck recently. The large pool of beautifully bright water had led excavators down beneath the surface of Eos, to a large subterranean network of rivers. It had tripled the productive water supply and allowed the settlement to expand very rapidly with both population-based statistics and construction. More recreation centres, more scientific establishments for the science teams that were now beginning to experiment and research a lot more of the outlying regions of Eos. 

Furnishings of the stacked up mock apartments were getting better, Ryder had been given her own complementary stack of housing pods for herself and her team, with the best Prodromos had to offer at the time. Only the best was offered to the woman who founded the damn place and all the squadmates who had helped. Ryder actually liked being pampered and offered a lot for her efforts in gaining the Initiative and Humanity a foothold and a colonised stake in Andromeda. She felt it was what she actually deserved. Maybe not what she had wanted in the first place when she had first come out of that infernal cryostasis pod only to see her father die on the first mission in the new Galaxy. But after all, she had done to get here, after defeating The Archon and saving the Hyperion, after losing Dunn. This was what Sara needed. 

Some well earned and relaxing shore leave with her team, no, her family, and her beautiful girlfriend Peebee. Sara smiled as she turned over in the sheets, stark naked as Pelessaria was too, and looked into the sparkling pigments of the blue girl’s beautiful skin. The Pathfinder could not help herself, she pulled her feminine hand from under the sheets and ran the side of her fingers down the beautiful Asari’s cheek, grazing her so gently, like a feather. 

Yet Peebee still woke up from it anyway. Like a hawk.

“Huh? What was that?” She asked, drowsily waking from her light sleep, her eyes half open and her head tentacles soft and limp from the deep relaxation. Her lips were a little mellow and a little dry from the dehydration during hibernation, she was still slowly waking up from the stroke.

Sara’s face popped and her lips were almost absorbed into her face as she lay there next to Peebee and fell silent and shocked that her fingers woke up the Asari. That was certainly not intended and now she was busted. She’d woken her girlfriend up and Peebee was a nightmare when she was rudely awoken. And Sara knew she would know what woke her, Peebee was malicious with her Sara now and knew all that she would and could do, despite the Ryder’s unpredictable nature. Cora and Vetra agreed Peebee was the only one who knew what Ryder was thinking at all times. 

“Ryder? Were you touching me? Were you touching my face?!” Peebee shrieked as she suddenly sat up and edged further and further away from her girlfriend in the bed. Her breasts shook and jolted and of course, Sara’s eyes darted to the nipples which were already perky. “You know I don’t like touching in my sleep!” The Asari shouted again, her face shellshocked that Ryder would dare. She covered her chest with the blanket, swiping it away from Ryder trying to clothe herself because she saw Sara’s eyes fixated on the bouncing and swaying orbs and the nipples as they hardened from the sudden temperature change and embarrassment. 

“Sara stop staring at my breasts! By the fucking goddess!” Peebee swore, clutching the frilly sheets to cover them. Sara just smiled and crawled closer to Peebee, she knew they were not being serious. The Asari was teasing, she always teased. 

“Why do you have to cover them Peebee? It’s not like I haven’t sucked on them for like two hours on the Tempest…” Sara reminded her, and Peebee’s face popped as Sara’s did earlier. Suddenly it was not about the face touching, it was about the blue woman’s chest, her bountiful orbs that loved and craved attention. In the undertones of their playful voices, the pair could tell that there was some teasing playfulness and that Peebee was gradually silently asking Sara for some form of sexual interaction. As she edged around the bed, trying to create space between them, which Sara was crossing like a hyperactive kitten, Peebee’s legs were spread inch by inch, and the sheets fell in a way to cover the succulent passionfruit that was her azure, the thing that Sara’s lips were becoming wet with want for. 

She was licking her mouth insatiably in hope that she could grab the sheets and pull them away from her Asami and then have a full frontal view, the one she now wanted. “Come on Peebee gimme the blanket so I can see you,” Sara bargained, to which Peebee gasped fakely again. 

“See me? I mean what, what am I, Sara? Some piece of Asari meat for you to gawk at? Is that what I am to you?” Peebee joked, still crawling away from her encroaching girlfriend with a smile on her face now. It so melodramatic, all for a small bit of head before they would eventually have t get up and check on the rest of the squad and enjoy the sun. 

Ryder giggled on an audible out breath as she crawled towards Peebee with added haste, her morning lady boner and heat was starting to really flare up and she needed something to release her all on. She wanted to grab Peebee and bring her beautiful silk, the azure betwixt her legs up to her her own chin and she wanted to lick, to clean and taste her fill with her familiar girlfriend as she had done a few times now since the night before they the Remnant City. She wanted to taste her again, to slather expert and queer tongue all along Peebee’s azure, to make her cry out with pleasure, Sara wanted that unbearable strongly now as she hustled towards more towards Peebee and gripped on the sheets.

“Sara Ryder!” Peebee cried, still acting, she liked this little facade she’d rushed but she knew that Sara could tell she was only joking. When the beautiful Pathfinder tore away the sheets and Peebee’s beautiful breasts were back on show she did a sort of teasing wiggle to show her girlfriend that she most certainly agreed with and wanted to continue in the direction Sara was taking them in. The speedy Ryder’s jaw dropped and her eyes were almost hypnotised as she saw Peebee’s figure nude and slender again, as she spread her legs to let Ryder take the whole image of her naked cunt and already bulging clitoris. 

The Pathfinder smiled, sliding her hands up the length of Peebee’s almost sparkling blue thighs and running her nails along her perky and peachy rear. “Oh Peebee, you’re freaking gorgeous in the mornings, you know that right?” Sara told her lover, mellow and a little mesmerised. 

“I’m gorgeous at all times of the day I’ll have you know, lover. Now, what’s say you quit stalling and give me some head like you’ve been wanting to?” Peebee asked, laying on her lower back and elbows while she still could. Her breasts fell onto her chest like perfect water droplets with a gelatinous texture that were also firm. She displayed them like precious gems, that needed to be protected, that needed to be held and only Sara’s hands would do. Peebee foresaw she would, as she felt nailed and hungry fingers slide a little more up her ass ready to grip. “Come on Sara, eat me out honey, I love you.”

“I fucking love you too Peebee,” Sara snarled like a hungry beast and before she did anything else, before she even breathed, she pulled at Peebee’s rear, dragging her lower half towards her on the bed and Sra’s own head inserted between her girlfriend’s legs, her tongue darting for the azure that had already begun to seep sweet and succulent wetness. The tongue began to slip up and down, with Sara’s lips kissing Peebee’s cunt tenderly, as her tongue flickered back and forth, gathering small amounts of the wetness and taking it into her own mouth. She sighed and breathe out short and sustained exhilarated breaths once she got that sweet taste of her blue girlfriend. Peebee tastes so sweet and so perfect, better than chocolate, better than mint, she was gorgeous, to die for and Sara could not get enough of that taste. 

She slurped up the wetness load by load, really slipping in her tongue and flicking it back and forth over Peebee’s folds, even venturing up, with her lips tugging and popping on the Asari’s clit. Pelessaria cried out, rushing her fingers through Sara’s long flowing pale brunette hair as she buried her tongue and lips deep into the azure before her. She took her fill, lapping up the wetness like a kitten with a saucer of milk. Her tongue was flapping rapidly as Peebee held her head down, running blue fingers through hair and crying, almost screaming with strained pleasure as Sara licked her and gave her head. It was glorious, so unadulterated and steamy, rushed and yet methodical and messy. The wetness dripped and ran from Peebee’s entrance and slipped down her rear entrance and onto the sheets, staining them with the Asari’s secretion. 

“Fuck, Peebee, your so gorgeous and you taste so fucking good,” Sara cursed violently as she held Peebee’s ass a little tight with one hand. 

The Asari took the free hand and tugged it upwards, guiding it to one of her bare breasts and placing it to hold it. “Hold me, Sara, hold me here and don’t let go until I come, I’m already close honey,” Peebee breathed, her voice sounding to tight and held in, suppressed by the heavy exhilaration. She was loving this almost as much as Sara was loving eating her out. It was so heavy and so messy, so without form or method but so precise. It was a beautiful love-making that Peebee realised she could only get with Sara.

As the Pathfinder dipped her head back down again and took Peebee into her mouth once again, the budding clit and bulbous lips inside her own, the Asari snapped a little, rocking her head back as the wash of wet pleasure barreled over her. She brought on the meld every so quickly it was a slip of her mind, and suddenly she and Sara were bonding, their thoughts spilling into one another, their emotions becoming connected and their eyes, both of them becoming jet black orbs in their skulls. Sara gasped as she realised and suddenly she was as close to the edge as Peebee was once they were fully melded. She gasped, they both gasped as Sara continued to flick her tongue and take more and more of the wetness into her mouth. 

“Ah!” Echoed in their minds as they entangled themselves and blended feelings and thoughts. Suddenly neither could control themselves, the barriers were broken and before either could think, Peebee was coming all into Sara’s mouth, and Sara was coming all over the white light blue sheets of the bed. They were coming together as they were melded. 

They came together, and soon meandered into each other’s arms, still connected, still melded and sharing one state of mind, one thought process centre and one fluid and vibrating set of emotions that struggled to settle at first. Once they were in the sheets again and in each other’s grasp, they mellowed and settled into one liquid state of being. They stayed there awhile, just holding onto each other.

“I love you Peebee,” Sara spoke so softly as she nestled her head between the Asari’s breasts. 

“I love you too, Sara Ryder…”

“What do you mean Sloane got off of Daeus alive and with a mysterious and unidentified package?” Jarun Tann barked into the comm of his holodesk. He’d been waiting patiently with Addison for hours for an update on his executive order to eradicate both Sloane Kelley and Sara Ryder and the crew of the Tempest after suspicions that they had found something on Daeus that could spark civil war on the Nexus and destroy the tangible government the two had formed since they had arrived in Andromeda. 

Those very APEX Strike Teams dispatched were now reporting in that Sloane Kelley had not only escaped their reach, but also with a mysterious cargo acquired from Daeus, and now Ryder and the Tempest had done the same. They had lost both of Tann’s targets and he was outraged. “That’s right sir. Ryder and Tempest bugged out before Sloane, they entered FTL before we could even get a fix on their destination and Sloane took every step to make sure we couldn’t follow her to her real safe house. She let us across five jumps before we lost her. It was like she knew we were coming for her.” The APEX Commander reported in a gruff and disgruntled voice. 

Addison had her fingertip between her teeth, stressed and losing herself worrying about this, and she knew this would happen, she knew Kelley and how tenacious she was. Sloane was no fool and certainly no amateur. Of course, she knew that Tann would dispatch a kill team, it was why she sent that email to Addison. It was a final effort to try and convince the woman to see the light and join her, but in failing that, Sloane must have known that if Foster had not made contact again in so long, she had gone to Tann. 

Foster had sealed her fate and only now had she realised it. She felt stupid, but Addison was a woman who rolled with the punches once her course was set, and her course had been set for her now, there was no going back from this. Which is what she had dealt with months ago when she and Tann started on this journey of deception. 

“Listen to me, Commander. You get on Kelley’s trail, and you find Sara Ryder and her team, and you eliminate them before this situation gets out of hand,” Tann instructed the commander, his voice bitter for a Salarian with a hint of anger and sparking rage that was begging to be exhumed. He did not care for failure when he had his rapid Salarian mind set on a goal, and eliminating Ryder and Sloane were two objectives he had to complete for his career and possibly his life to thrive. 

“What situation is that Director?” The Commander asked down the line, suspicion in his voice. 

Tann flipped, he spun and swatting the stack of papers and data pads from his desk and barked down the communication line. “Don’t question the extent of the danger they are putting the Nexus in Commander! Just get out there, find them, and kill them!” He blathered, fully losing his temper.

Foster Addison had never seen a Salarian lose their temper before, and she did not wish to see it again. It was a ghastly and inorganic sight, something that a sea creature might look like. He was flailing horrific arms around and his face was pressed. It was so strange. 

“We should have made a decision on Sloane months ago, either before the Hyperion and Ryder got here or before she helped us take Meridian. Ryder will never go against her now,” Foster told him, ignoring his childish temper and bout of anger. She was more speaking out loud than trying to persuade him of his own mistakes. She just wanted to speak her mind and break the solid and tense silence before he did with something aimed at her; while she was still scared of the news leaking out, she was beginning to form her own backbone to this. “And if APEX is successful and kills Ryder and her team, how are we going to play it Jarun? How will you pass an assassination of the Human Pathfinder and her second off as anything but what it will be?”

Jarun glared at her. 

“You mean how will we pass it of Addison, don’t you?” He asked but cut her off before she could get further than opening her mouth to speak. “Because if you think there is a way to throw me under the bus here and not implicate yourself, Addison, I will assure you that I will not go down silently. If I go down here for what we did, then you will be coming with me Addison, I promise you that.”

She gulped, taken down a notch but still calculating in her mind a little through the intimidation and fear of what would happen to both of them if the news broke. She was kept on the straight and narrow by his words. It was dire, Sloane and Ryder needed to be silenced before they either learnt too much or broke it to the masses of Nexus. It would risk civil war at the least and possibly just a straight witch hunt followed by a swift and summary execution without trial. They would both be spit roasted and spaced as fast as possible. 

Addison left, a little hastily as she refused to remain in the same room as Tann for too long, and once she did, she activated her omni-tool. “Breker, it’s Addison, I need you for a bit, can you get away from the Affairs desk for a while? “

“Of course Director, where should we meet?”

“At my apartment, and bring an encrypter Breker, one not on the files, please,” Foster asked, trying to keep her voice down as she made swiftly for the station car that could send her to the official Living Quarters deck where she lived. She had a plan, a small one, but she had hurriedly decided that she could not let Tann take her under with him. News about the other Pathfinder’s deaths would break soon, and Sarissa would make to Ryder, she knew it. It would all come tumbling down very quickly unless Tann killed them all. And Foster had decided as soon as he had decided to do so, that she could not. 

She helped Sarissa escape, she helped Tann kill the other two. She had to play both sides because she knew it was the only way to get where she wanted to get. 

A meeting with Sloane Kelley, before and after she cracked open that cryostasis pod, and before Tann found Ryder on Eos. Addison was amazed he hadn’t guessed already, she was amazed her methods of concealing it from him were working. 

But that was her job - Colonial Affairs. 

To Be Continued.


	7. It's Always Sunny On Eos, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After her morning with girlfriend Peebee, Sara tends to business with Vetra, which very rapidly begins to unravel as the conspiracy between The Nexus and Sloane Kelly is unfolded before Ryder's very eyes. She begins to click to the actions that have been happening while she has been enjoying herself and while she saw to Daeus. Now she figures out what Tann is doing but not why. There lies one more piece of the puzzle. What really happened between Sloane and Nexus Control.

Sara and Peebee were still in their room, having just had sex, aware of the dangers that had been occurring around Heleus.

They stayed in bed for what seemed like a further two hours, the time melting away before them as they held each other, Sara occasionally giggling at the texture of the sparkling blue scales along her flesh. She loved it so much, the tickles that Peebee gave her all over whenever they cuddled in naked form. Legs rubbed against others and their chest was pressed from time to time. Pelessaria could not help her fingers from coursing through Sara’s hair, she could not get enough of it in that bed for it was strange to see Sara with her hair down and not in the simple bun she almost always sported. A lot while on Tempest she would braid her hair for bed, when it was not an all nighter, so to see the stoney brunette locks curling and flowing down her shoulders was strange. Just to have her fingers through actual hair was strange to the young Pelessaria. She was aged one hundred with change but she had never seduced a cute human woman into bed enough to actually stop and take stock of her hair. She decided that she adored Ryder’s hair, that it was lush and splendid and she should devote more time to just feeling it. 

“Are you in love with my hair or something?” Sara asked, suddenly taking note of all the time the Asari’s blue fingers were running through the brown strands. Her rather plump lips were thicker still, smiling beautifully as Sara held herself up with an elbow buried in her pillow. 

Peebee’s fingers stopped when Sara spoke, and suddenly the undertone of bright mauve grew under her beautifully blue cheeks. She was politely embarrassed, just as Sara was when she was stroking the Asari’s face in her sleep, it was quite cute and the Pathfinder smiled to herself, busting her pursed lips with a giggle. 

“Come here you dweeb, come here and kiss me one more time before we eventually have to get up,” Sara asked her girlfriend as they both smiled toothy grins before limbs and torsos began to move closer to each other. They kissed passionately and a little seductively, with tongues slipping between lips before Ryder hoisted herself over Peebee and held her close, nails ripping down the spine of the blue woman’s back as the human sank her teeth into the blue and scaly flesh of Pelessaria B’Sayle’s neck.

Peebee laughed, letting out a sharp and adorable giggle as Sara bit into her to bruise her blue flesh, to mark her as a girlfriend would, the Asari had never really had it happen to her before, it was not a custom Asari or other Milky Way species were attuned to. But she liked it when Sara did it, liked it when she bit her and sucked to mark her, making the blood rush to the bite mark. 

But the teeth soon left her neck after all the laughing and Sara was staring into her eyes once more, rubbing at the place where her face paint was. And the Pathfinder suddenly wondered how her girlfriend looked with the paint, what her eyes and brows looked like completely naturally, how beautiful her entire face would be even without the paint. She gave Peebee another peck on the lips and then jolted from the bed, completely naked and opened the windows, drawing the blinds open to let the light of the Eos morning inside the room, and to let the view of a naked human Pathfinder out to the world.

“Ryder! What are you doing?!” Peebee shrieked, hoisting the covers over her breasts and sitting up in the bed. 

“Come on Peebee, no one is gonna be looking up at the reserved apartment where the human Pathfinder is staying, I doubt anyone even knows we’re here,” Sara calmed her, moving away from the window back to the bed to cuddle her girlfriend a little more before having to get dressed ready for a day of pure relaxation with the rest of the family. She already had plans to whoop Liam in soccer once again and then take a trip out into the desert with Cora to check on a little patch of flora she was growing. 

But before the Pathfinder could reach her shy and beautiful girlfriend, she heard her omni-tool on the bedside counter go off and a sharp and prickly voice come over the voice channel - Vetra Nyx. 

She was waiting outside, her omni-tool up and talking to someone on the other line, and by the look in her feline-like Turian eyes, she did not look completely at ease with her surroundings right now. Sara tensed, her shoulders stiffening when she exited the building and met Vetra’s gaze. 

Either she was in trouble for spending the whole morning in bed with Peebee, or something was deeply, deeply wrong. By the deep-seated black at the centre of the cat eyes of the Turian, Sara was hedging her bets on the latter. And they had only really just got settled. All of them. 

Core had even mentioned her date arriving today and that she was going to finally introduce Sara to her. Ryder pulled out her own omi-tool, patching SAM in and then directing a line to Jaal and to Drack. She thought about Scott, for a split second, only to disregard her own apprehension. If this was trouble brewing (trouble which Vetra had detected) she wanted Scott in the loop, but not in the cult. It was the first real time Sara had thought tactically since Meridian, and it felt cold, but it felt a little right. 

Jaal and Drack were the right choices, perhaps Cora but Sara refrained because she did not want to ruin her day. Liam was busy playing soccer with the youths too, he should be left from the shit of the day to day. This was supposed to be shore leave, and yet every nerve in Sara was screaming. 

All from the look that Vetra was giving her. 

“What is it Vetra? What’s wrong?” Sara asked, getting right to the point. She was now too far on edge to wade through expositive bullshit. She needed a report and she needed it now. Ryder even spotted the mild breeze of a sigh coming from the gaps in the female Turian’s mandibles and her mouth piece. Every one of her species had a gap between them, where there was a space between mouth and mandibles. It was more open and obvious in the males but Vetra had it too.

Vetra came right out and said it, as defeated as she was, but there were certainly trace amounts of anger and frustration in her voice. “Get a load of this, little bird.” Vetra notioned, pulling up her forearm and omni-tool again. “Go ahead, Rix, tell her.”

Avitus Rix - Turian Pathfinder, was on the other end of the line, and he sounded, from what Sara could tell like he was on a ship going FTL. “We may have a serious problem, Ryder. I’ve filled Vetra in but I’ve completely lost contact with Captain Hayjer, and Sarissa has gone off of the radar. All I got was an emergency data flare from her about two days ago. She’s silent now, I can’t reach her.” He reported, and as he did so Sara just felt her insides churn and shrivel up into balls of nerves and grimace. This was not good at all. 

“Kett?” Sara asked, deep down knowing that answer would result in a negative response, the Kett were weakened beyond belief and even more after taking down their outpost on Daeus. They hadn’t silenced Hayjer or Sarissa. This was different, and if they had, both Pathfinders would have done more than signal a flare to their fellow comrades. Not only that but Sara would have heard something from Nexus. 

The Nexus. The thought stained Sara’s mind like a bad dream. 

As Rix tried to talk, she cut him off, shaking her head. “Forget that, this ain’t the Kett. This isn’t their style, and both Sarissa and Hayjer would do more than going silent. Not to mention I’d have Nexus Control breathing down my neck to bring them back. No. I know who this is.” 

It all clicked for her. Impulsive and assuming to an astronomical point, but Sara felt it in her gut, her skills of deduction pushing her thoughts to one conclusion. 

This was Tann. He’d killed them, both of them, and he was gunning for Rix and her too. 

“Who is it, bird?” Vetra asked, her anger whisked away with her confusion and need to know what the hell was happening and who was doing it to them. She was suddenly fearful for their safety. All of them. 

Liam was on the soccer pitch with the teens and kids, Cora around the improvised and barely set up bazaar. Peebee was in the suite August had gifted to Ryder for her efforts and setting up the entire outpost now turned colony. Suvi and Kallo were still onboard the Tempest as they usually were - Gil too, as he worked on something he said he was keeping secret and experimental with the Nomad (Sara had seen ordnance in the lower cargo bay and therefore theorised it was guns, or worse). Drack and Jaal were at unknown locations and Lexi too, Sara had no idea where they were nor Vetra. 

Scott was equally as lost, although the last time Vetra had seen him, he was chasing (unsuccessfully) after Lieutenant Harper around the bazaar as she waited for her date - her Asari date.

Sara looked at Vetra and then at the sandy ground of desert, then back to the carapaced smuggler. “It’s Tann, he’s cleaning house, and I have no idea why ” Sara confessed to both the Turians feeling far too exposed in this open setting. Instantly she began to look around the prefabs and some of the taller buildings. He had to be using APEX - Nexus Control didn’t have STG in Andromeda, there was nothing else in terms of tactical combat teams he could be using as assassinations. Again Sara was looking around the buildings and crowd, her danger senses, the ones that had been ringing like a cell phone on and before Daeus, they were ringing and deafening her as she looked. 

All she was seeing was the crowd, mixed with all species, a few trucks - one parked near her apartment, around the corner of the side, away from the front entrance. There were species everywhere - Angarans, Humans, Salarians, Turians, Asari. All that currently inhabited Heleus, they were here and walking around Prodromos, it was impossible for Sara to focus on what she was looking for. And she didn’t even know what she was looking for.

Her time with an Alliance Peacekeeping Team had not included scouting for enemy snipers and APEX was good, they knew a lot more about the ins and outs of tactical espionage and assassination. 

“If Tann’s cleaning house there has to be a motive and a reason Ryder, I don’t get it, why would he do this now? Why not during or after Meridian? It’s been months,” Rix stated over the omni-tool. Vetra could see Sara’s eyes scanning the surrounding area. She slipped her hand down to her belt and flicked the small transponder cylinder - a small signal to Kallo and Tempest to be on high alert. 

Something that had been cooked up back before Ryder had the keys to the beautiful ship.

“Kallo, we have Vetra’s emergency signal, but I have her transponder and it’s coming from yards away,” Suvi mentioned to the quick and quirky Salarian pilot in the chair to her right. Her sublime Scottish accent was a breath of fresh air but it was tainted with concerned confusion. She stood up a little and looked over from their improvised landing pad to the main outpost/colony. She could see Vetra from here, she was talking to Ryder. They were a little ways away but Suvi could see them. 

The Salarian pilot looked over too and squinted to see them both talking. He noticed the fluttering orange of Vetra’s omni-tool. Kallo hit the call button to the drive core - he needed Gil. “How is that drive core looking Gil?” He asked, his voice a little more rushed than the usual rate of a Salarian. He was looking to Vetra and then to the alert coming from the dashboard. Then back to Vetra. This was beginning to disturb him. 

“Not bad,” Gil grunted from the compartment in the rear of the Tempest, near the engines. “Couple more minutes to scrub the manifolds and she’ll be in better condition as when we left Nexus the first time. Why? What’s the rush Kallo?” He asked, standing from the underside of the main core itself, which was offline while he fixed it. The whole system had blown multiple sub-systems from the fancy flying on Daeus. 

Kallo hesitated from saying anything, his mouth closed and his vision honed on Vetra for a signal from her, anything more on top of her transponder. Suvi was stood right beside him, waiting for something to call her to action on the scanners.

“Stand by Gil, we may need the small arms too,” Kallo told him. 

Gil wiped his brow, suddenly having his heart beat a little faster. He could feel the slow drip feed of adrenaline hit his system as he methodically remembered where the small arms locker was. He had no arms training. Suvi had a little, but Scott had the most, and he was almost dishonourably discharged from the Alliance. Gil was suddenly feeling sick as he stumbled out of the drive core compartment into the main cargo bay. The small arms locker was in Liam’s room. Scott was sleeping still. 

“What are you waiting for Kallo?” Suvi asked, back up on the bridge. 

Kallo’s eyes were still fixated, like a machine, over on Vetra looking for any subtle movements. “The right movement. Or the moment something happens.”

“If Tann’s cleaning house it has to be something related to Sloane Kelly. She told you explicitly not to trust him, or Addison, I bet she knows what’s going on,” Vetra explained, thinking back to what Sloane had said before boots had even hit the ground running on Daeus. It was all connecting in ways that made Sara’s stomach churn and making her sick. 

There were links between Tann, Addison, Daeus, Sloane Kelly - all of them invisible to Sara at this moment. She could not see the main crux of the web of links but she could tell it was big, something massive in scope and something that all of them wanted to hide. 

Sara staggered back. Rix was off of the line, he was heading to a secure location with the rest of his Pathfinder team from the Turian Ark, somewhere that APEX wouldn’t find him but Sara could. Vetra had already made sure her line was clean and the trace undetectable. Not to mention encrypted, she was good like that. No one would have been listening in on the call. “This whole thing stinks Ryder, we should leave. They could be targeting you too.”

“But why would Tann want to wipe only Pathfinders off of the board, Vetra? Huh?” Sara shouted, stressed out of her mind over this. Why was this happening? What had she missed? It was the key to this, if she found it, she would have the reason why Tann was wanting the Pathfinders dead. “Why only us? What the fuck could Sloane have brought me into on Daeus huh? What do I know that Tann doesn’t want me to?” she spoke aloud. 

Vetra shook herself. “Something he doesn’t want--”

Bang. Or rather, snip. Vetra was flung over and landed on her back, the sound of the round ringing in Sara’s ear she was so close to the Turian. 

Vetra had been shot, and Sara could not tell where she had but there was blood all over the ground, the purple-blue blood. It took another second for anything to happen but Sara eventually pulled out the pistol she had strapped to her thigh and was holding it as the sound of bullets were flying through the air. The outpost was erupting into conflict. 

Sara took cover by a bench, dragging Vetra with her by her collar, but still, she could not see where her friend had been shot at all. There was a lot of blood though. “Vetra! Vetra come on! Fuck!” 

Ryder was looking behind her, to the apartment as Peebee came running out with a sidearm in her hands. And just as she did, Sara noticed the truck parked right beside the building again, with a Turian running from it with a device in his hand. 

“Pebee!! No!” Ryder cried at the top of her lungs and watched as the truck blew up, and Peebee was sent flying like a stone across the neighbourhood, caught in the shock of the explosion. 

To Be Continued...


	8. It's Always Sunny On Eos, Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hell runs through Prodromos untamed and Sara is stuck as Vetra bleeds out before her. The rest of the team scrambles to get to her and make her safe. Drack tries to find Peebee and Cora makes an almighty sacrifice to save her friends. Meanwhile, Sloane's long game finally comes to fruition and she opens the stasis pod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah so I am very sorry this took forever to release, no one is probably gonna read this, but please enjoy if you do.

“SAM, I need all my profiles unlocked right fucking now!” Sara screamed at her AI implant, taking the same cover behind the bench with Vetra still unconscious, and bleeding profusely from her shoulder, beside her. From that shot, Ryder had at least determined that the sniper was going for a grazing shot. Non-lethal. So they wanted her and everyone else alive. Then she looked back to the smoking plume of the detonation and hoped to the stars that Peebee was alive. Sara was going to kill them all. “Then get me everyone on the line, everyone.”

SAM’s voice was actually a little startled and distressed for an AI and yet he still connected everyone before giving her the bad news. “Pathfinder, you know I cannot unlock and connect all combat profiles for you at once without risking severe distress to your mind. All the data could possibly shock you into a coma, or worse.”

Sara didn’t listen. 

After she fired a few shots into the Turian in civilian’s clothing coming up from the truck explosion behind her she pulled up her omni-tool panel and loaded up the Engineer profile manually. Then she heard Drack speak through the communication line, shots being fired and crossing over his vocal patterns while he made himself audible. 

“What the hell is going on? How the fuck did they detonate an IED?” The Krogan asked before making himself visible from his cover and blasting three thugs coming for him with huge shots from his Claymore shotgun. “I mean, I don’t not appreciate an explosion, but I usually like it...” He let off three more shots. “When those explosions are coming at me!” Another two. “And not unarmed civilians!” And then three more to finish his clip before he reloaded. The old man was chuckling a little, unknowing that Vetra was down and that Sara couldn’t see or find Peebee after she had been thrown about the street from the explosion. There was still so much smoke coming from that truck. Then Cora’s voice came over the line. 

“Ryder, I’m a building away, I’m coming, you’re with Vetra?” Harper asked, the shouting noises of ensuing thugs and APEX agents coming from behind her. Sara was hunkered down, scared, actually terrified for her life and the lives of others as she reloaded with so much shock in her hands. 

She could barely keep hold of the thermal clip to slot it into the damn pistol her hands were shaking so much and her lips trembling too. Sara cursed to herself. An almighty “Fuck,” and a stomp on the ground before she leaned over the bench and shot the clip’s worth of ammo downrange. 

Three agents were slotted and another three clipped in their torsos and left to bleed out on the streets. Sara bit her lip so hard it sparked a drop of blood into the red sand underfoot and she reloaded once more under the cover of her perch.

Sara leaned down a little more, tears now dripping from her eyes as she cried to herself. She had no idea if Vetra’s heart was still beating or if Peebee was even in one piece around the corner of the makeshift street. She was terrified of the APEX forces shooting their way across the colony and she was utterly alone. And now she could not talk, could not speak she was so petrified that what had happened in the last few minutes. It had been two at her best guess since she and Vetra were standing, in the middle of the street, completely open. 

Completely open for a sniper to slot one in the Turian’s shoulder and make the blood spill from her like slashing through an orange. Sara slammed her fist on her temple to hurt herself over the sound of the gunfire rifling through the sky. Again and again, and again, three and then four and a fifth time she punched herself in her temple as if this was a god-awful dream she just hoped one knockout punch would wake her from. She could not bear to stay in this hell any longer. Nor could she bare to try and read Vetra’s pulse - she had no idea if she could tell with a Turian. Her knowledge of the raptor-like beings and their anatomy and physiology was slimmer than her know-how of the inner workings of FTL drives.

“Ryder! Come on! I’m almost there, isn’t Vetra still with you?” Cora asked again and Sara had to breathe. 

She let out all the build-up air in her lungs in one massive exhale and reconfigured herself to where she was, however, she was still staking and still crying as she bit her hand. Biting down so hard she began to bleed from a second location, with a bruise swelling at her temple from the punching. Ryder wanted to tear her hair out next, clumps at a time to let the hurt sting a little more. She was behind a bench, in cover, in the middle of a firefight with a dying female Turian named Vetra Nyx with her and her Asari girlfriend Peebee somewhere else because of an explosion. That was her sitrep. That was what she had to tell Cora. 

It had been so long of mild skirmishes with Kett and then such and downtime between them, Sara had forgotten what a serious and human firefight from the depths of a peaceful day was like. She had forgotten what the feeling of being in an ambush was. 

Never in her life had Ryder been in this position. Yes, she had served with an Alliance Peacekeeping Force. Yes, she had fired her rifle and pistol on humans and other aliens from the Milky Way before. Yes, she had put people to death. Yes, she had been fired upon, shot at, even with rockets. Yes, she had seen a friend die. 

But Ryder had never been stood right next to a best friend as they got shot. And she had never seen anyone caught in an explosion before.

“Uh, shit, shit, fuck, yes, oh fuck, no. She’s been shot, fuck, she’s bleeding out. I… I don’t know if she’s bleeding out. Fuck. I don’t even know if she’s breathing. Vetra. Vetra got shot. Fuck she got shot, she’s bleeding Cora. She’s bleeding. There was a sniper! There’s so much blood!” Sara reported, crying still and fumbling all over Vetra to finally get pressure on the wound that had spilt so much blood it was essentially like a rug on the floor and Sara was kneeling in it. Her pants and her hands were now soaked with vibrant green-violet and she was still looking up at her makeshift apartment complex for any sign of Peebee at all after the explosion. She still couldn’t see anything, but that was what she had to tell Cora next. She had to tell her what had happened to Peebee. “There was a fucking terrorist near my apartment! Fuck he was right there, he fucking watched me leave! He detonated some IED on a truck, Peebee was caught in the blast, I can’t find her. Fuck, I don’t know if she’s alive

“Cora! Anyone! Please help me!” Sara cried, screamed all the more as the blood kept leaking out through her fingers and the cracks in her palms. She was shaking more than she ever had.

Ryder was sobbing, unable to wipe her eyes from the flowing tears, unable to keep her hands clean. While not red, while not human blood, blood she was so used to, seeing the ultraviolet liquid coming through her fingers, it made Sara’s stomach flip. 

Churning, and turning aside, she vomited to the floor, expunging all the content of her stomach in one violent splatter of throw up. It was tasteless to Sara as more and more horrific adrenaline made her feel as if she was running through lightning or swimming in lava. Everything was so vibrant, her head was pounding and she wanted to vomit again. She did.

Cora gasped on the line. Sara heard her shoot through three more APEX troopers around the corner and then she saw the white-blonde hair of her second coming running to her. “Liam, I need you! Right fucking now! Link up with Jaal and get a distraction for me as soon as you can. Drack, find Peebee, find her now old man.” Cora told the remaining members of Team Tempest and all the boys scrambled. Then Cora changed frequencies to the ship. “Gil tell me there are guns on the Nomad now.”

“I’m afraid not, and the thing is still on the lift. I need more time!” The engineer reported, such a weight in his voice Cora could feel his sense of helplessness. But she needed more than that right now. She was Sara’s second, she was de facto leader with Ryder in such a state. She needed so much more.

Looking across the street, Cora saw another two thugs trying to encroach and get the drop on Sara. Cora could see her behind the bench and checked her pistol - the Biotic was running low on ammunition and there were no more reinforcements. 

She looked up and saw Sara, spotting Drack using what appeared to be his almighty warlord hammer to flailing around at the thugs, clearing a path to where Peebee could have been. And Cora saw Vetra at Sara’s knees finally, blood pouring from her in a sea of ultraviolet, and there was so much blood around there that Cora even felt like tears were coming from her as she looked to Sara trying so desperately to keep Vetra from giving in. And the blonde had absolutely no idea what the Turian’s vitals were like.

“SAM! How’s Vetra looking? Do you have a response from Peebee? Anything you can detect?” Cora asked the AI, trying so hard to keep focused and use the logical side of her thrilled mind instead of ignoring sense and making mistakes. Cora had that problem with her, she often ignored logic, as did Ryder, as did Liam. Not many of their family saw sense right from the off, it was part of their charm, but now called for sense and method, SAM would help with both as the personalised machine coursed through the battle as if it were a stop-motion film. He had the entire field of battle at his non-existent fingertips, able to interact with literally everything within his own simulation. In his suite, even from the Hyperion, SAM began to work.

The AI, in many ways, breathed and came alive as time slowed for him and he entered the realm of quantum computing.

“...Analyzing.” He stated into her ear, and the world stopped for him in the infinite of a microsecond. 

SAM scanned the entire area with his sensors, using the detectors around the colony, using the surveillance cameras, the tiny nerves of the area, and the nodes that were Cora, Liam, Ryder, Drack, Vetra, Peebee, and the Tempest. He had everything coursing through him like a blizzard of information. He loaded all of Sara’s profiles ready for her in an autoloader of himself. He found Vetra and Sara by the bench, the three thugs coming for them, their reinforcements, he determined which men and women were APEX in civvies and which weren’t. He drew the battle lines and loaded them as a heads-up display for all operatives. Still, time was stopped still for him, all of this loading and analyzing happening in no time at all in the real world. In his cyberspace, it pained him to run through and crunch all of these massive numbers. Ones and zeros assaulted him and he tried to keep up with them, in his element. He felt purely alive. This was what Alec wanted him for, why he had been created, it was his purpose. SAM felt it running through his circuits. 

After what felt like centuries, he finally warped back to Cora, loading her a tactical visor of who was foe and who was friend for her as he returned. 

“Both Nyx and B’Sale are alive, Harper. Drack has the Asari in his care, but Vetra will need to be moved to the Tempest or another medical facility as soon as she can. I have alerted Doctor T’Perro to prep for triage immediately,” SAM reported, taking that weight off of Cora’s mind. 

At the same time, he relayed the findings to Sara and the woman shuddered as she kept the pressure on Vetra’s neck. Her hands were suddenly a lot steadier yet the tears burst from her over the news that Peebee was alive. Now she wanted her profiles all at once. She could feel the ground shaking minutely under her pained feet, and a hulking creak off in the distance as the sounds of Jaal, Liam and Drack all engaging the remaining APEX forces violated her ears. Gone was the need to vomit now, her stomach was suspended in zero-gravity as the adrenaline overrode her entire body and made the colours of Eos pop until she was almost blinded. Footsteps coming closer felt and sounded like giants clobbering the ground like Godzilla.

Cora saw them too. 

An Atlas, in industrial colours yet with a grenade and rocket launcher, mounted, another behind it, and with really armed APEX operatives this time. They had had enough of street attrition to the team of the Tempest and now wanted Sara and her family buried with the colony. It would all be an accident. Drack was coming around the corner with Peebee in his arms, Jaal and Liam joining the group from their engagements - rifles in hands and reloaded. But this looked like it. 

“SAM, I need you to overextend my amp, right now. Turn safeties off and give me as much as you can.” Cora demanded of the AI as she shot the three thugs in their heads before they could make it to the bench. She called for Liam and Jaal to move up to defend Sara as Drack ran for the Tempest. “Gil, I really need that Nomad now.” She switched comm channel and called to the engineer. 

She flexed, almost ripping through her own civvies until she decided she wanted the sleeves off. These clothes would do her no good here, she was about to possibly thread herself through the element zero in her system and become absolutely nothing in a few moments if she wasn’t careful. Yet there was no time for being careful. There were two mechs coming for them and she needed them gone as quick as possible.

This was what the Asari had trained her for. 

“Cora, there is no guarantee that you’ll live through the exposure and that much unhandled Biotic display. Are you sure you wish for me to turn the safeties off?” SAM asked her as if needing her consent to almost die. If this went wrong, or the enemy got off the right shot of her, with no barrier, there’d be nothing left anyway. Cora wondered if this was going to hurt, but then decided it’d be worth it to save her friends. 

To save her family. Tempest was her family, Tempest was home. Sara was her sister, as close as one could get to be a chosen sister. Cora was not going to let these people kill her for nothing. Whoever was behind this, they were going to pay, even if Cora wasn’t there to see it happen. 

She rolled her neck around to loosen up, as Liam and Jaal looked to her in amazement. “What is she doing?” Jaal asked as he took some fire and gave the enemy a few volleys of his own from his stolen and treasured Kett weapon. Liam was shouting for her to get down as he helped Sara with Vetra. The blood was stopped but they needed medical help now. Right now. 

“Yes SAM, turn them off and give me everything you can from my amp. Now.”

The AI did as instructed, and turned off the safeties of her Biotic Implant and overextended it, ramping it all up, the power output and capacity as much as he could with direct intervention. It was not what he had with Sara, but he gave Cora all he could influence, as much as he could and as she could handle. With her consent, a little more - Cora began to glow a stunning purple, dark matter surrounding her and the mass effect fields of her barrier creating a small wall before her extending outwards to the enemy. 

When it reached the nearest Turian and went through him, the man simply evaporated, the Biotics shredding his cells and killing them all until he was turned into a husky shell, dead as soon as the barrier phased through him. 

A few more fell to Cora’s barrier, their guns coming apart in little pieces. When the Atlas mechs fired shells at the barrier their munitions turned to dust, and Cora snapped her wrist, creating another mass effect field to pull a shotgun to her. Instantly the ammo was warped and Cora turned her walk into a run, dropping her barrier but massive and rippling mass effect fields emanated from her fingers. Taking the shotgun into one hand she clenched the other into a fist and charged at the enemy. 

One moment she was running, the next she became pure dark matter and then snapped back into shape on the end of her biotic charge, behind two men. One of them she shot at point blank range, ripping his midriff apart and letting the guts suspend in no gravity. The second she punched in the face with a warping fist, bursting his face into pure red until there was nothing, not even a splatter. No bone. But she snapped again, charging in reverse behind two more and shooting them both, making the same massive hole in their chests. She leapt at the claw of an Atlas came for her and punched into the joint of the limb, taking the arm clean off with a shredding tug on the circuits. They were just not there anymore once her hand came back. Leaping off of it she glided through the air, creating a shockwave blast at the feet of two more men, detonating it and sending them so far into the air the fall would most certainly be fatal. She pulled the legs of the one-armed Atlas with more mass effect fields and tripped the hulking thing upon itself, its legs not tethered to the planet anymore. As she landed on the second mech, she slammed a group of four more operatives, crushing their spines and killing them immediately once they hit the floor with a slam. She shot another three rounds into the cabin of the second Atlas but only managed to shred its shields. Still, it moved and grabbed her from the roof of the canopy with the claw. Cora simply charged again across it, zapping into dark matter and then becoming herself again moments later as she flew through the air. She shot into the canopy once more, breaking the glass and smiling. 

The energy, the dark matter consuming her made her want to vomit, she felt so sick, her head pounding and her bones aching as if she had run six marathons without food and very little water. Her limbs went numb but she carried on. As she fell to the floor she pulled on the claw of the Atlas, while the second regained footing, but the second didn’t move, Cora did. She propelled toward the claw and grabbed it, abandoning her shotty to the floor as she swung on the metal. While touching it, she channelled the dark matter and mass effect fields into the mecha and found herself influencing it. Whether she stopped gravity around them or simply nullified the thing’s weight, the Atlas suddenly felt like a log, enough for Cora to move it of her own strength. She was swinging around the claw, but soon felt herself holding it in her hand and then she was swinging the Atlas around, and she threw it right into the second, exposing the small port behind it, where the gas canister of the thing was primed. 

Landing, Cora created one last Biotic attack, a throwing orb, large and powerful, channelling everything into it, and she felt herself losing control. Everything was going black, after popping with colour and small blotched around her vision. She was struggling to keep there, to hold vision, to hold anything, consciousness. 

“SAM turn me down! Turn it off completely! Now!” She yelled at the AI in herself, and the machine got to work winding the power levels down. Right as he did, Cora let go of her throw, and it hit the canister. 

Both Atlas mechs and any personnel around them exploded in a flurry of gassy and spacial flame, engulfing the metal and bodies of anyone around it and blasting Cora back and away down the road to the bench. She was on fire in places. 

Her clothes were flaming and Jaal quickly got to work snuffing them out with his three-fingered paws. She was alive, as SAM told him and everyone else, but the exposure and taxation of such an extreme Biotic assault had extended her beyond her reach. She was sleeping, acutely comatose, but she’d wake soon enough. Sara fell back on her ass finally and shuddered again, letting Liam fully take over the pressure of Vetra’s neck. The enemy was down, and two massive towers of smoke snaked into the sky, from the Atlas ruins and the apartment behind them. 

The sound of the Nomad rushing for them was the next noise, as well as August and a dozen medical personnel of the colony coming from hiding to tend to the wounded. August had a rifle in his arms and was shooting the stragglers of the operation that was either on fire or just clinging to life. He did not want them living, he would not let them live, they were intruders, invaders to Prodromos, and he was putting them down. They deserved it. 

But one was still clawing around the bench as medics finally got to Vetra, one of them being Lexi and another being Gil as he helped them stabilise Vetra from the ground before getting her onto a stretcher. Her neck wound was clamped and she still had a heartbeat, Lexi was rushing her into a prefab she’d been told had more equipment inside. She gestured for four more doctors to follow Jaal to the Tempest to go help with Peebee, as she was not done and still being kept under by Kallo and Suvi. SAM reassured everyone that all Cora needed was a bed, and fluids, thus they went with his instructions.

Sara just sat against the bench, her face, her hands, her entire body sprayed and covered in red and ultraviolet blood, from head to toe she was drenched in the stuff and her hands were still shaking. Liam was helping the crash crews and medical teams help the settlement and the wounded. It was Drack who finally came to Sara, seeing her there, utterly stunned, utterly suspended in something even he hadn’t seen. 

The old Krogan was barely alive himself, he’d lived longer than any of the family, than Peebee, and even he had not seen a look on the face of another like Sara Ryder’s.

It was one of ultimate horror, of repulsion. As if she had seen someone being turned inside out, or worse. The tales her eyes told him, they took all words out of his breath. 

Drack helped her up, enough to give her a Krogan smile, a dry sigh and an embrace, not having much else to give her at all, there would be time for that later. His attention was dragged from her to the clinging to life operative behind the very bench she’d been covered by for the duration of the firefight, the old man wanted to have words. But Sara was not left for long, she soon saw something she’d forgotten, running for her with more speed than his legs seemed capable of. 

Scott. 

He pedalled for her and landed with her bloodied body in his arms as if he’d hit her like a bean bag shot. She passed Vetra’s blood to his clothes and he just held her so closely there was no way he was going to let her go at all. His fingers threaded through her hair and suddenly they were both crying, Sara utterly weeping like the day after she’d woken from Habitat Six and her father dead. And Scott was cuddling her, crying into her shoulder like the very day they believed their mother had died. Only this time it was so much worse, Sara was destroyed, and Scott could not believe anything of it. Ryder just had to hold Ryder, his older twin sister, yet right now she seemed to be so many years younger than him. The blood between them, Vetra’s blood, it made her cry all the more. And Scott just kept holding her in the middle of the road. 

“We are never splitting up again. You got that? You hear me, Sara?”

Sara’s words were assaulted with tears and the choking of her sobbing but she looking him in his sparkling eyes and held his face. Her brother. Her twin brother and he was real, and he was alive. After everything else, after The Archon, after Meridian, after the Scourge almost taking him from her, Sara had him. 

And he was alive. 

“Don’t you ever leave me again okay? Never! You hear me? You stay with me, you stay with me and you stay right here until I can’t breathe anymore okay?” She asked him, over and over again, succumbing to her tears again breaking down in his arms. He held her close again, cuddling her and letting her sob.

The Krogan ripped August’s rifle from his hands and took it to the legs of the operative still slightly bleeding out. On closer inspection, his wound was purely cosmetic and non-lethal. He’d be fine. Or was going to be fine, until Drack blew his left leg off at the knee and separated him from the limb. The man screamed in pain, having lost one leg, and with Drack eying up the second with a hungry mouth. 

“You know, I’ve tasted your kind before, human. Not that tasty, but I promise you I’m pretty hungry right now after that fight. You’re gonna tell me who ordered this or that other leg’s gonna be supper. You hear me?” The ancient Krogan threatened, sticking the barrel of the rifle into the guy’s knee and pulling at his shirt. The man was bald, and his eyes told so much fear his screamed were superfluous. 

August leaned in. “He’s gonna bleed out before you even get to appetizers at this speed. And I’ve got more medi-gel than he’s gonna need.” 

“I’ve been at this for hundreds of years, trust me, he’s not gonna bleed out until I let him.”

August turned to the man, still breathing heavily and trying not to focus on his severed leg. APEX was tough, the best of the best, hence why Tann wanted them on this, but the guy was not accustomed to losing limbs. And Drack was right, he had been doing this for literally hundreds of years - this sorry casualty wasn’t going to even wet himself, without Drack saying he could, or would. 

“It was Tann! Okay! Fuck! It was Tann! It gave the order to Kandros that he wanted all the Pathfinders gone for what Ryder and Sloane Kelley found on Daeus, for who was in that fucking pod okay?!”

Drack shot the other leg off and the man screamed, but August applied the medi-gel to prevent him from dying. Yet the Krogan was holding the man by the neck, his raged flaring as he held the cripple now so close to him. 

“And what was in that blasted pod?!”

“Sloane, we’re online, we’ve cracked into the stasis pod’s firewalls and can safely bring her out of stasis now.” Kelley’s man relayed to her from his instruments. They were back on Kadera and Sloane was in her small throne room, the drapery replaced and littered with wirings and in the middle of the whole place was the pod from Daeus. And now it was ready to be opened. Sloane could not wait for a second longer, she’d been waiting for this for months. All of the cover-ups had gone completely as planned and now she’d gotten her grubby paws back on what she had even created the whole Nexus Rebellion for. 

This was it, Tann’s downfall, the true promise of the Andromeda Initiative and the return from the madness that had been Tann in charge of the whole project. Sloane had the one thing that he’d tried to rid the Nexus of. Her plan had succeeded. 

Their plan had succeeded. 

“Open the fucking thing, now, and make sure she’s as we left her. If there are any alterations in her health, I’ll kill you myself.” Sloane ordered, and the pod whirled with added life as the technicians and aides began to wind down the stasis protocols and operations. Slowly the body inside thawed and came from a state of sleep to fully awakened bliss. 

The pod opened, and she came out, scanning her surroundings - a woman, with clipped raven hair and sharp, determined eyes. She clued in and eyes Slone before her in seconds, and clambered from the pod in her stasis scrubs. The woman faltered a few times, falling on one knee and heaving as her body adjusted to the area around her. Sloane came to her and held her arms, and the women stayed as the rest of the room fell silent. 

“It’s been a few months. The Arks came, and things snowballed. But everything’s stable for now. We’re on a planet called Kadera and the Uprising was a success. Nexus is on skeleton crew even with the Arks. There’s a lot more I gotta tell you. 

“But are you okay?” Sloane asked the woman, as she calmed herself and readjusted from stasis to this new world. This, Kadera. 

Yet the woman did not answer. Sloane looked down into her eyes. 

“Jien… Are you okay? Are you there? Jien? Jien Garson, do you know me?” Sloane asked, asked the old leader of the Andromeda Initiative. She was talking to Jien Garson. Jien Garson. She was alive. And she had been for the entire time. 

The raven-haired transwoman looked up, and struggled to her feet, using Sloane as a crutch until she finally spoke. 

“I’m Jien Garson. You are Sloane Kelley… And yes. I’m okay.” She breathed, hobbling to the throne that Sloane prestigiously gave her to sit on, but she was so cold, her body acclimatising to this warmer yet colder world. Stasis was strange, and that had been her second time in it. This time, to escape Tann’s coup and make the entire project except for Sloane and her rebels think she was dead. Or whatever Tann and Addison told them. 

“Sloane. Where is Alec… Where is Ryder?”

To Be Continued…


	9. It's Always Sunny To Be Jien Garson, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jien Garson recounts the moments leading up to her 'death', ruminating on who the real culprit could have been, and loyalties between her and Sloane begin to be thrown into doubt as Sloane asks her Director where the funding for the Andromeda Initiative really came from, and who was really pulling the strings before they left the Milky Way...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so so sorry this took so long to come out and I'm so sorry it's only short but I'm really just trying to build suspense now. The reason this took so long is - life. Things got tough and I'm only now coming out of it, and I'm reading Initiation (Cora's Prequel Book) so hopefully I can make this all the better because of that! Enjoy and let me know if you enjoyed this tease.

Jien rounded the corner, unto the apartments, sensing the same people following her that had been doing so since she bolted from her office, decks and decks above. She was terrified, so alone, their jammers barely still working. Her omni-tool was fried, still adjusting, but she still had SAM. He was her only hope.

“SAM, I need you, right now.” Garson called to her implant, needing SAM now more than anything. She had to think of the fly as she ran, finding the apartments so close to her. There was still no one around, the entire section of Nexus powered down, waiting for the Arks and more people awake from cryo stasis. Jien had relatively nothing to work with, which made her all the more terrified. 

The AI sprang to life in his suite nearby, finding Jien running around away from those following her. Although he could find them, they were masked to him. There were definitely other powers at work here, if Alec were here this would be so much easier. If the Hyperion had arrived on time, or earlier, if Alec Ryder was on board, SAM could reach out to his veterened creator and human Pathfinder, finding him and diverting him to Jien to save her. 

At this rate, she would be shot and dead before anyone else could get to her, before SAM could even find them. 

“Director, I am here. What do you require?” SAM asked Jien as she skirted around another corner and into the vast rows of private domiciles. She found one that was empty and readied to hack the lock and let herself in. She needed time. 

“SAM, I need you to shut down the shuttle. Stop them from reaching me if you can, and then I need you to break down the locks to my vitals. I need you to get to my heart, my lungs, all of it, as fast as you can SAM,” Jien told him, breathing rapidly and so very afraid as she busted through the small firewall on the door controls and let herself into the prefab. There was a bed and not much else, a couple of preloaded decorations and a wide panel-like telescreen on the far wall looking back on the bed. Jien was running the calculations in her head as fast as she could. There was so much she needed to think before they got to her, but she had less than minutes in all probability. The telescreen looked perfect for something she had planned.

Where the hell was Kelley? Where was anyone? Jien needed someone, she needed Alec right now, but he was in dark space, in cryo, along with all the other Pathfinders and their teams. 

Jien Garson was the utmost authority and already she was trying to be killed by forces unknown. On whose orders were these bought security forces Jien did not know, other than it was not Sloane’s for sure. There were a thousand officials in the Andromeda Initiative that would want her head, or it could even be Cerberus. Jien had proof they were trying to smuggle themselves on board the Nexus before it left the Milky Way, trying to infiltrate the whole Initiative, as well as so many other organisation. This only made her all the more terrified. It was to do with the money, Jien knew it in her gut. It was the bad money, the money she didn’t have herself and what she had done to get it. Now it was coming for her like a reaper’s scythe, swift and ruthless. If only she knew whose arm was swinging for her head now.

Eventually Jien got tired.

She pulled out her sidearm and judged the possible outcomes here, and then fixated on one of them obsessively over and over again as a million cycles a second - she could survive this, but it would take so much time. “SAM get me Sloane on the line now, right now.” She barked to her AI with vitriolic desperation.

“Director, their jammers are still having a minute effect on vocal communications and I cannot guarantee I will be able to fight wholly through the interference.” SAM told her, his voice as calm as ever and as monotonal and gender-neutral as it always had been. Yet even SAM seemed perturbed by the situation. 

Jien lost it, she needed Sloane now, she was the only person Garson could truly trust now; not any of the other leaders in cryo, or out of it. They had their own agendas and aims, she knew it. But Sloane was not close enough, nowhere near - the thugs were going to get to Jien and they were going to definitely kill her here and now. On whose orders she did not know but it was going to happen now unless SAM was fast and Jien even faster, along with more luck than ever. But if this happened the way she wanted it, she might yet live. 

“Chief Kelley, Director, on the line.” SAM’s voice came into Jien’s ears as she flicked her omni-tool covered hand to the door and made sure it would take a while for the thugs to get in while she directed Sloane.

Kelley’s voice was rushed and panting, she was obviously running and Jien began to weep a little as she heard the pattern and thundering of desperate footsteps barrelling down the line in her ears. She could tell Sloane was coming for her, but the banging at the threshold told her that the thugs were at the door. Jien could not contain her tears. While she had combat experience, she did not have experience in being targeted like this. Close-quarters and she believed the thugs had shotguns versus her pistol. She was the Director, the whole project rested on her shoulders, and she was about to be killed like some helpless animal. If she was going to die, Jien would rather die in the Milky Way, with her sisters. 

“Jien, I’m almost there,” Sloane roared down the communicae, but Jien was looking to the thermal clip in her pistol. SAM was routing her biology and coursing through her, as much as he could and she knew there would only be one shot. Jien had two rounds left, just enough to lay waste to the thugs if they didn’t just rip through her already. But it would take one of the bullets to execute her plan to the fullest extent. Careful timing and an amazing scene would keep her alive here. The thugs were banging against the door with a shoulder as one of them was splicing through the reinforced lock, hacking at the countermeasure Jien had swiftly erected to buy time. 

Director Garson flicked through her omni-tool and slapped everything onto a data drive, all the information she had of the money trail, the twisted steps she had taken to secure the money needed for the whole Initiative, what she had. The only thing left she did not have, that she could place on the drive, was who it led to. Even now she knew it was foolhardy to give them up. It was more damning than anything else in her life. If anyone were to know who had funded the project, who was potentially really pulling the strings, Jien would be utterly destroyed. Once the download was complete, she reached behind the telescreen and plastered the drive to the inner panel of the thing, in plain sight but she deemed it the best hiding place. With more luck, no one would find it until she could return for it, if she even could. 

Then Jien turned to the bed, readying herself. “Sloane, you’ll know what to do once you find me. Wait for Alec and Hyperion, wait for Ryder, once he arrives, give him everything - and make them pay.” Garson instructed Kelley, and terminated the channel from her omni-tool, flaring her SOS beacon for Sloane to find her. “SAM,” Jien called next. 

“I am fully operational and complete control over your vitals, Director, I am ready.” 

Sucking up her last breath and preparing for oblivion, Jien closed her eyes. She aimed for her sternum, and hoped it would take more time for her bleed out than she estimated, that Kelley would find her before the blood loss took her in the end. “Now SAM!” Jien called out, shooting herself twice through her lower abdomen and falling directly onto the cushioned bedding, blood pouring from her as SAM wrapped his non-existent entanglements around her heart and put her deep into a sleep, keeping her pulse steady a solid beat every minute. It would be enough to keep her clinging to life, slowing the blood as much as he could and keeping her from bleeding out. Once she hit the bedding, the door opened and thugs entered. 

The rest was in the hands of fate and luck. And of course, Sloane knew all of it. 

“I just need to ask one thing, Jien, before we go any further,” Sloane asked the Director, carefully and slowly, her eyes like daggers as loyalties began to fracture ever so slightly. 

Jien Garson didn’t speak, as she looked across the makeshift throne room. She leered over, elbows against her thighs as she sat forward on what was Sloane throne. There was a silence that was deadly in the air as the two women looked at each other, so much still untold between the pair in the months that had brought absolute anarchy and then hope to Helius. Jien had missed all that, and Sloane had done her best to seemingly jeopardise it. What was left at their feet now was a conspiracy that had began in the Milky Way, and by now had grown to become a festering tumour in the heart of the Initiative. Jien even knew what her hand was going to ask her. She had guessed that Sloane had found the data drive behind the telescreen and replaced it with something, if Ryder - Sara Ryder - had known that Tann had twisted the truth about her death. Her eyes challenged Sloane now. 

Kelley’s eyes were wavering, but she needed the answer, if she could in turn trust Jien, who had made her do so much that had caused chaos. The Uprising was Jien’s plan all along, and Sloane had committed everything to seeing it done, to lead them to this point. Now she needed closure. 

“Jien,” Sloane began, feeling small for once. “Where did the money come from? Who’s really behind the Initiative?”

Garson sat back, and sighed. “Sloane. What do you know about the Protheans?”


	10. It's Always Sunny To Be Jien Garson, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jien gets up to speed with the status of the Nexus as well as the security protocols as she and Sloane turn Kadara Port into a base of operations with which to launch an attack on the station for Tann's head. Sara succumbs to the reality that is the horrors she experienced on Eos, with Vetra and Peebee still out for the count and in the hospital. And already there appear to be fractures between Jien and Sloane as both fail to understand what horrible events are about to come in the war for the Initiative.

Ryder reloaded her shotgun and drew her Asari sword, swiping across a fresh whetstone only once and then lifting her helmet over her head, breathing as regularly as she could while her suit air seals clamped down around her and her internal oxygen levels registered as nominal. She was running off of her suit now before nodding to the man at the door to the vacuum sealed combat simulator. 

“Pathfinder,” the man nodded and grunted before opening the door and letting her enter to train alone. When she was in he sealed the door and began to pump out the oxygen from the trailing room until it was dry. The only way she was getting air now was if she left. Ryder looked at him and nodded at him to begin the simulation. She stowed the shotgun away at the base of her spine and sheathed the sword again, pulling her assault rifle out for a change and calming her mind. Sara had been trying her hardest for six days now to block out the horrific scene on the street. The shooting, the explosions, the APEX operatives sent to murder her along with her entire team. By Jarun Tann too. The betrayal had cut her down the centre of everything she knew to be real and now Ryder’s emotions were bleeding out of her profusely. 

She had not spoken to many people or said a word at all. Six days in quiet recluse while the rest of the Tempest team aided to clear and clean Prodromos suited her best. And Sara had not had the courage to enter the infirmary yet, not at all. There was not enough courage in all of Andromeda to help her walk through those clinical doors. 

“You can leave now, Private. I’d like to be alone for a while,” Sara told the militiaman coldly and he saluted her. She supposed she was lucky to be a Pathfinder, the Pathfinder who had relatively saved humanity in this new galaxy. Sara supposed that if she wasn’t, the man might not have left. Her position and escapades, the fortitude of the whole team aboard the Tempest had rewarded her with an aura of the commandment, not unlike the kind her father had had. Thinking of Alec was already making her angry now. Not sad, Sara had no room left for sadness after the past six days. She was only intensely angry. 

SAM’s voice was the next one to come to her, in her ears and in her mind, through how connected they were. Sara could not be Sara anymore, she was Sara with SAM, always, after Habitat 6. “Pathfinder, shall I begin the simulation?” The unshackled, experimental and potentially life-threatening AI asked of her. 

It was hard to quantify SAM, to categorise or explain him, as well as his personality. To say he didn’t have one at all was simply wrong. SAM was more than nothing, there were an artificial mind and an intent behind him. Alec had created and developed something that had never been experienced before, and as Sara stood in the middle of the combat suite, thinking about all that she had lost, and all that she had left (SAM unsurprisingly at the top of the list due to how connected they were), she could not comprehend what her father was thinking or doing when he made SAM in the first place. What had made him so ravenous about the idea of AI when he had known what the Geth were and what they had done? Was he trying to prove that the Geth were simply flawed? That all assumptions about AI being a doomed to implode creation were false and that organics would always be their masters? Sara still couldn’t comprehend it at all, and it began to make her feel slightly sick. 

She wanted to be alone this time. Without SAM for a change. 

“SAM?” She asked the disembodied voice. 

“Yes, Pathfinder? Is there something more you require before beginning the exercise?” The AI asked her back, no feeling in his voice at all. This time, it seemed colder than usual, more like he was just a servant, a piece of equipment when Sara knew he wasn’t. When she knew he was so much more to both her and to Alec. 

SAM had never been intended to serve but to aid and assist, and that was what potentially made him the most dangerous thing in Andromeda. 

Sara had to breathe again. It felt so stuffy, and her chest began to heave and flutter as if she was suffocating. “SAM, can you… turn off for a while?” 

There was a momentary pause. “I am unable to shut down, Pathfinder, if I did so, you would pass into cardiac arrest,” he reported as coldly as before. Sara suddenly wanted him out of her head as she began to mildly panic. 

“SAM please just get out of my head as much as you can for a while, I feel sick!” Sara shouted frantically and swayed her head back in a small fit. The room was beginning to feel like it was crushing her. 

There came no response from SAM, but Sara began to already feel like he was gone for now. Yet, still heaving from how heavy her chest felt, she struggled over to the environmental controls and activated the emergency flooding system, slamming her body against the wall and sliding down to the floor as oxygen invaded the space and covered it in breathable hair. Sara pulled her helmet from her head and gasped for fresh air as if she were dying. Her vision blurred and popped from the unhealthy change in air pressure so rapidly but she didn’t care. She still felt like vomiting her guts out with all her might, when her head began to pulse and she broke out in a cold sweat. The simulation wasn’t even calibrated yet, there was no way it could start and yet Sara was freaking out and believing she was in the middle of combat. She turned frantically and looked all around her. There was nothing there but she felt like she was being watched, eyed from points on high. She aimed to the ceiling with her assault rifle and her trigger finger became itchy, wanting to push down on the trigger. It was as if she was about to be sniped - as Vetra had. 

The thought whistled through her mind and she spun. “Vetra?” Sara cried, but no one was there. Holding her forehead she shook her head rapidly and tossed the rifle to the floor, charging to the door and opening the air seal to let herself out. 

Sara didn’t leave the combat simulator, instead, as soon as the air seal was closed, her rifle still inside, she sunk back to the floor and began to cry. 

“Tann’s gonna have the whole Nexus on red alert now, all ports and access points locked down and he’s gonna have armed shuttle watches. That’s siege protocol, you know that. Fuck, you came up with it, Jien,” Sloane barked at her superior, irked by her nonchalant way of nonsensical preparation. They had been trying for days to analyse the exterior of the Nexus to find a way into it, but nothing was jumping out at them. Sloane was beginning to become pissed off, and Jien seemed too calm for her deal with. The ex-director had been out of cryo for a little over a week now, and the whole time had been spent bringing her up to speed with the state of the whole Initiative and what the affairs were life around Kadara and the rest of Helius. She was failing to see the whole picture yet. 

Jien remembered Tann, not well, but she recalled his face and his behaviour. Spineless and administrative, and the mere thought of him in command of the Initiative sickened Garson. The added information that Foster Addison, a dear friend of Jien, was aiding him and running the colonial side of things made her all the angrier. But she wasn’t showing it at all, and Sloane wanted her to. 

The display of the Nexus taking up the majority of space of Sloane’s throne room, which had now been retrofitted into a tactical suite and an operational command centre was separated into sections. The main ring was the largest and most detailed hologram, with the four spires parted out around it so the Nexus looked like a circular starfish with only four fins. Jien was pacing around it as Sloane continued to read through the excessive stockpile of notes they had on the security details of the station. She’d written and signed off on the majority of them, although being in this position, outside of the station, was the one place that made her the most useless. 

“If you would have stayed on the Nexus, we wouldn’t be having this issue, would we Sloane?” Jien asked sarcastically, not even looking at Kelley. 

The former security chief almost shouted, her eyes popping with intense fury instantly at the comment. “You what?” She asked Garson, standing up straight from her station. The rest of the personnel around the room stopped what they were doing and looked to one of the women. They could not believe what had just been said. 

Jien didn’t back down. “What was the plan, Sloane? In case of my getting assassinated? Stuff me in a cryo-pod like we agreed and wait for Alec to arrive with the Hyperion, then we’d deal with what came next.”

Just like Garson, Sloane did not hold back. She clenched her fists and strode up to her director, with gritted teeth and spurred, even hurt, pride. Without pause, she swung her fist and punched Jien right in the jaw, knocking her to the floor instantly with a thud. The room fell deathly silent and Sloane’s right hand Turian moved toward her. She held out her hand, commanding him to hold back. “Don’t you fucking dare think you have the gall to judge me or anyone in this room on what we did after you went dark. Don’t, you, dare,” Sloane confronted Jien, eyeing her intensely on the floor. Jien looked like a beaten animal for a second. “There are things we did you wouldn’t even dream could be possible, Jien. And you know why we did them? You know why we started a civil war on that fucking Nexus while you slept?”

There was still silence and Garson didn’t dare to speak yet. 

“You want to start another one just to kill Tann and Addison and put yourself back on top so we can run this fucking thing like we were supposed to? Let’s fucking go, I want him dead more than anyone in this whole fucking galaxy, trust me Jien, fucking trust me. But don’t you fucking dare question or complain about anything I’ve done since you got fucked. Everything I did, everything every person in this room did, was to save your arse so we could put it back into the throne of the Initiative, you hear me?” Sloane barked at her, eyeing her like a wild animal and then stormed off, out of the command centre and into the port she had come to call her own. The Turian followed, leaving Jien to struggle to her feet and question just what kind of an Initiative, what kind of people had she turned these people into since losing her battle with the Benefactor and letting Tann steamroll over the entire program. 

What was obvious, was that Sloane was a completely different person now, withered by the chaotic politics of a disastrous coup and a bloody uprising. Jien was like a brand-new skycar compared to Sloane, and until now she hadn’t thought about it. 

Garson turned to the communications specialist, feeling embarrassed and ashamed of herself. She caressed her own cheek to soothe the wound. “Can you get me a message sent to Sara Ryder aboard the Tempest?” She asked the Human woman.

“What do you want me to send, Director Garson?”

It took a moment to think about it. What could she say to even grab Ryder’s attention? Given the reports of what had transpired on Eos, there wasn’t much that would actually make out the seriousness of what was happening now that Jien was breathing outside of the cryostasis pod. And much more needed to happen if the Initiative were to continue if the prospects of the dream in Andromeda were to actually come to fruition. Tann needed to be killed, quickly and without quarter, Jien had settled on that very early out of the pod. Foster needed to go too if she could not fall in line, and Garson was still deliberating on whether the woman would - Sloane was untrusting of her since the coup. Kesh needed to be safe. If she was killed and Krogan found out, it would a full-scale war with them until the Initiative was destroyed. And Jien didn’t like to admit it now, but she already needed the Ryder Twins, Sara, especially. She needed all the Pathfinders left alive. If Sara wouldn’t join for an attack on the Nexus, then Tann would win and the Initiative would fracture like ruined marble. It would all be for nothing. 

“Tell her Jien Garson needs to speak with her, as soon as she’s able if she wants to stay alive from Tann.”

Liam burst into the simulator in a hot sweat, his omni-tool displayed over his left arm and his eyes looked as if he’d seen a ghost. “Ryder! Ryder!” He was crying as he entered, Sara shooting out of her skin and jumping to her feet as soon as she heard him screaming her name for the third time. What was this?

“Ryder!” He cried again, almost bumping into her. Sara stopped him and held his arms in her hands, everything else getting shut out and Liam bringing her back to reality at the right moment. 

She looked at him seriously and quizzically. “Liam? What the hell are you doing?” She asked, puzzled beyond all belief. But Liam didn’t answer, he just showed her his omni-tool and the text on the video panel flickering as she moved her hand from covering it. It only took Sara a couple of seconds to get through what it said but as she comprehended it, her face turned as white as it could and she shared Liam’s concern. It was from Kadara, but she couldn’t believe what it actually read. She turned back to look at Liam and her composure, suddenly from nowhere, seemed to calm him down. “Who’s on the Tempest?” She asked him clearly and without anything else. 

“Kallo and Suvi are still in the cockpit, Gil’s tinkering with the Nomad. Drack and Cora are aboard and proceeding with the final retrofits and stock refills,” Liam quickly reported, the formality letting him breathe. 

“Get onboard and tell Kallo to set a course for Kadara, we’re going there right now.”

She heaved herself to leave in a rush, but Liam stopped her with his hand tugging on her arm a second, his voice almost breaking as if he were a teenager he was so rattled and struck by this. It felt like lightning coursing through both of them. “What about Vetra and Peebee? What about Jaal and Scott? And Prodromos?” He asked her, utterly shocked at what was happening. What even was happening anymore?

Sara eyed him gravely. “We’re coming back, but Liam, we have to go. Right now, you get me?”

He was without reply for a second, but her look demanded his compliance. “Aye, aye.”

Then finally she moved out of the building in a sprint, racing for the Tempest with him. The world was turning upside down. The Pathfinders were running for their lives, Vetra and Peebee were both in critical condition and now it appeared that people were coming back from the grave to shake things up. Tann was a traitor, aiming to gun down every Pathfinder as well as Sara and her team by using Kandros and APEX as his own secret police. Sara was definitely thinking that they should have all taken their chances with the Reapers back in the Milky Way.


End file.
